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ECCE  CLERUS 


OR 


THE  CHRISTIAN  MINISTER  IN  MANY  LIGHTS 


A  STUDENT  OF  THE  TIMES 


NEW  YORK:    EATON   &   MAINS 

CINCINNATI :  CURTS  &  JENNINGS 

1899 


/ 


Copyright  by 

EATON  &  MAINS, 

1899. 


TO  THE  MEMBERS  OF  HIS  HOUSEHOLD, 

TO  WHOM 

DURING  MANY  YEARS  OF 

VARIED  LITERARY  AND  MINISTERIAL  LABOR 

HE  HAS  BEEN  INDEBTED 

FOR  MUCH  HELP  AND  MANY  COMFORTS, 

THIS  VOLUME 

IS  AFFECTIONATELY  DEDICATED 

.     BY  THE  AUTHOR. 


PREFACE 


THIS  treatise  is  an  attempt  to  deal  with  some  pressing 
present-day  problems  having  their  incidence  within  the 
sphere  of  religion  and  holding  peculiarly  intimate  relation 
to  the  ministerial  calling.  Fidelity  to  its  aim  in  this  regard 
makes  it  a  more  or  less  free  and  candid  criticism  of  the 
spirit,  status,  functions,  methods,  and  achievements  of  the 
Christian  ministry,  viewed  in  the  light  of  the  New  Testament 
and  the  special  requirements  of  the  age.  Some  of  its 
chapters  were  read  as  essays  within  recent  years  at  meet- 
ings of  evangelical  associations,  pastors'  unions,  and  other 
ministerial  gatherings  held  in  various  cities  of  the  United 
States  where  the  author  has  resided,  exciting  at  the  time 
considerable  discussion,  and  eliciting  a  wide  variety  of 
opinion  on  the  questions  mooted.  Such  was  the  case  with 
Chapters  V,  VI,  VIII,  and  X,  dealing  respectively  with  "  The 
Theme  of  Preaching,"  "  The  Bugbear  of  the  Modern  Evan- 
gelical Pulpit,"  "The  Ministry  and  the  Masses,"  "The  Itin- 
erant Ministry  and  the  Settled  Pastorate  Compared  and 
Contrasted." 

The  book  is  a  word  from  the  watchtower  of  a  waning 
century — a  century  whose  significance  for  science,  philoso- 
phy, invention,  for  historical  and  critical  research,  for  com- 
mercial expansion  and  industrial  development,  for  moral, 
social,  and  penal  reform,  for  educational,  religious,  and  politi- 
cal progress,  is  probably  greater  than  that  of  any  two  pre- 
ceding centuries  which  have  contributed  any  kind  of  a 
record  to  the  annals  of  the  world. 

In  the  nature  of  things  the  retrospect  and  outlook  ob- 

5 


6  Preface 

tained  from  the  point  of  elevation  on  which  the  closing 
year  of  such  a  century  places  us  could  not  but  be  broad, 
varied,  and  profoundly  interesting.  And  it  would  be  won- 
derful indeed  if  many  dogmas  in  every  department  of 
thought  did  not  seem  different  to  us  near  its  close  from 
what  they  appeared  to  those  whose  mature  life  was  lived  at 
its  beginning.  With  one  feature  only — though  an  immensely 
important  one — of  the  general  forecast  thus  obtained,  namely, 
with  religion  in  its  administrative  and  practical  aspect,  is 
the  present  treatise  concerned. 

Though  thus  restricted  in  their  scope,  however,  it  is  pos- 
sible that  many  of  the  views  which  find  expression  in  this 
volume  may  provoke  demurrer,  some  on  account  of  their 
novelty  and  strangeness,  others  on  account  of  their  extreme 
conservatism.  The  writer  has  only  to  say  that,  in  either 
case,  what  he  has  written  simply  expresses  his  well-consid- 
ered and  mature  convictions,  and  for  these,  as  being  part 
and  parcel  of  his  intellectual  individuality,  whether  they 
be  right  or  wrong,  he  can  hardly  be  expected  to  apologize. 

Like  every  other  period  of  the  world's  history,  only  per- 
haps in  intenser  degree,  the  times  we  are  passing  through 
are  transitional.  A  quiet  but  profound  change  has  been 
and  is  taking  place  in  opinion  on  many  subjects,  and  there 
is  a  natural  preference,  even  in  departments  of  thought  and 
belief  not  seriously  influenced  by  such  change,  to  have 
even  old  truths  presented  in  the  intellectual  vogue  and 
fashion  of  the  time.  The  Ewiggeist  and  Zeitgeist— \.\\q 
Eternal  Spirit  and  the  Time  Spirit — are  not  necessarily  at 
war.  They  are  only  irreconcilable  when  the  latter,  instead 
of  taking  its  cue  and  complexion  from  the  former,  assumes 
to  be  the  dominant  and  determining  factor.  The  author, 
while  putting  in  a  plea  along  with  many  of  his  contem- 
poraries for  the  retention  of  old  truths,  beliefs,  and  insti- 
tutions, earnestly  desires  their  rehabilitation  and  forcible 
presentment    in   forms  adapted   to  the  needs   of  a  busy, 


Preface  7 

enterprising,  inquisitive,  and  restless  age,  and  he  will  be 
happy  if,  in  any  degree,  his  work  shall  prove  an  effective,  even 
though  nameless  and  impersonal,  appeal  of  the  spirit  of 
eternity  to  the  spirit  of  time.  It  may  be  that  in  the  revolu- 
tion that  has  for  some  time  been  proceeding  in  the  domain 
of  science,  philosophy,  historical  method,  and  religion  some 
opinions  and  doctrines  of  frail  foundation  and  doubtful 
value  have  gone  or  are  going,  but  the  eternal  facts  and  veri- 
ties of  religion — "  the  things  which  cannot  be  shaken  " — 
remain.  Religious  doctrines  and  institutions  emerge  from 
times  of  criticism  and  controversy  in  altered  shape,  but  the 
change  does  not  reduce  their  value  or  their  necessity  to 
the  spiritual  life  of  man.  And  so  long  as  it  is  an  impera- 
tive requirement  confronting  those  who  propose  by  new 
creeds — gnostic  or  agnostic — to  supplant  Christianity  in  the 
faith  and  affections  of  mankind  that  they  **  go  and  get 
themselves  crucified,"  there  is  no  real  ground  for  alarm. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  The  Christian  Ministry  Considered  as  a  Factor  in 

THE  Civilization  of  the  World. 

1.  The  Birth  of  a  New  Moral  Force 13 

2.  A  New  and  Nobler  Doctrine  of  Human  Destiny 18 

3.  The  Preacher's  Distinctive  Gift 19 

4.  The  Secret  of  His  Power 21 

5.  Notable  Examples 25 

6.  Measurable  Progress 29 

II.  Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry. 

1.  Rise  of  Type 34 

2.  Its  Forms  Pronounced 35 

3.  Its  Rule,  Rigid  and  Absolute 42 

4.  Application  of  the  Screw 44 

5.  Neither  Breadth  nor  Sublimity  in  Liberalism 54 

6.  Manifest  Destiny  of  the  Ministry 56 

III.  The  Minister  in  the  Making. 

1.  The  Raw  Material 59 

2.  The  Molding  of  Environment ....  70 

3.  The  Training  of  the  Schools,  which 

(i)  Must  adapt  itself  to  conditions  of  the  age 75 

(2)  Must  not  be  fearful  of  science  nor  jealous  of  man's 

intellectual  freedom 77 

(3)  Must  be  varied,  comprehensive,  and  thorough 80 

(4)  Hence,  fitted  to  impart  the  secret  of  power  required 

by  the  times 84 

IV.  The  Cardinal  Functions  and  Leading  Requisites  of 

the  Christian  Minister. 

1.  Proclaiming  the  Evangel 86 

2.  Christ  the  Prince  of  Heralds 88 

3.  Manhood  is  Requisite = . . .  90 

4.  Conviction  is  Indispensable 93 

5.  Persuasive  Power 95 

6.  Definiteness  of  Aim 98 


10  Contents 

CHAPTEK  PAGE 

7.  A  Standing  Attestation  of  the  Spirituality  of  the  Chris- 
tian Religion 99 

V.  The  Theme  of  Preaching. 

1.  The  Only  Saving  Name 105 

2.  The  Person  of  Christ 106 

3.  Our  Great  Exemplar no 

4.  Teacher  of  His  People 113 

5.  Pacifex  Maximus 116 

6.  Pledge  of  Our  Completed  Manhood 121 

7.  "  Our  Most  Worthy  Judge  Eternal " 123 

VI.  The  Bugbear  of  the  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit. 

1.  An  Important  Question 126 

2.  Significance  and  Bearings  of  the  Inquiry 128 

3.  Doctrine   of  Future    Retribution,  no   Figment   of   Me- 

diaeval Fancy 129 

4.  No  Lack  of  Definite  Statement  in  the  New  Testament. .  130 

5.  The  Doctrine  Essential  to  a  Complete  and  Well-artic- 

ulated System  of  Christian  Truth — Fourfold  Apocalypse  133 

6.  No  Theodicy  in  Science 135 

7.  Causes  Operating  toward  Alleged  Neglect : 

(i)  The  absence  of  any  vivid  sense  of  sin 137 

(2)  The  tendency  of  reason  to  usurp  the  place  of  faith..  138 

(3)  General  theological  unsettledness 139 

VII.    HOMILETICAL  CRAFTSMANSHIP. 

1.  Personality  of  the  Craftsman 146 

2.  Power  of  the  Ideal  in  Sermon-making 148 

3.  Unity  of  Theme  and  Thought 151 

4.  Selection  of  Materials 153 

5.  Simplicity  of  Structure 156 

6.  Homeliness  of  Illustration. 158 

7.  Adaptedness  to  the  Spiritual  Needs  of  the  People 162 

VIII.  The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses. 

r.  Condition  of  the  Masses 165 

2.  The  Problem  Stated 171 

3.  Failure  of  the  Church  to  Solve  the  Problem 174 

4.  Remedies  Suggested 177 

5.  The  True  Solution 183 

IX.  Missions  and  Missionaries  op  the  Twentieth  Century. 

I.  Christianity  an  Apocalypse 192 


Contents  11 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

2.  A  Hundred  Years  of  Missions 194 

3.  Present  Outljok 198 

(i)  Educated  heathen  assume  the  role  of  reformer  and 

apologist 198 

(2)  Adopt  a  policy  of  imitation 200 

(3)  Try  the  old  experiment  of  persecution 201 

4.  Policy  of  Success 203 

(i)  There  must  be  careful  study  of  ethnic  systems  and 

the  relation  of  Christianity  thereto 203 

(2)  Such  systems  must  be  contemplated  not  as  rehabil- 

itated by  philosophic  genius,  but  in  their  stay-at- 
home  aspect  and  attire,  and  in  their  practical  tend- 
encies and  actual  effects  on  the  lives  and  morals 
of  their  votaries 205 

(3)  There  must   be    adaptation  of   teaching  to  various 

heathen  types,  as  affected  by  race, religion,  historical 
antecedents,  present  political  condition,  degree  of 
civilization  reached,  etc 209 

(4)  Missionaries  must  not  lose  sight  of  the  primary  object 

— the  evangelization  and  salvation  of  heathen 
peoples 211 

(5)  Must  make  larger  and  freer  concessions  to  the  in- 

tellectual idiosyncrasies  and  social  usages  and  cus- 
toms of  heathen  communities 214 

X.  The  Itinerant  and  Settled  Pastorates  Compared  and 
Contrasted. 

1.  The  Itinerant  Ministry  not  an  Institution  of  Modern  Origin     218 

2.  Founder  of  the  Methodist  Itinerancy 220 

3.  Itinerancy  Defensible  on  the  Plea  of  Past  Utility  and  of 

High  and  Ancient  Example 221 

4.  Develops  a  Noble  Type  of  Character  and  a  Fine  Sense  of 

Brotherhood 224 

5.  Present  Practical  Value,  an  Item  Worthy  of  Attention. , .  227 

6.  Drawbacks  as  Compared  with  the  Settled  Pastorate 230 

XI.  The  Popular  Preacher. 

1.  Popular  Eloquence  not  the  Primary  Qualification  of  the 

Christian  Preacher 235 

2.  Popularity  no  Infallible  Sign  of  Public  Usefulness 239 

3.  Antipopular  Elements  Inhere  in  the  Essenceof  Christianity  242 

4.  Christianity  Nevertheless  a  Religion  for  the  People 248 


12  Contents 

CHAPTER  PAGB 

5.  Elements  of  Power 248 

XII.  The  Minister  in  Authority. 

1.  No  Divinely  Autiiorized  Form  of  Ecclesiastical  Polity.. .  251 

2.  Early  Christian  Leaders  Indifferent  as  to  Names,  Titles, 

and  Specific  Forms  of  Ecclesiastical  Authority 253 

3.  The  New  Testament  Doctrine  of  Authority 256 

4.  Forms  of  the  Embodiment  of  Authority  in  Apostolic  and 

Subapostolic  Times 259 

5.  Abuse  of  Power 263 

XIII.  Some  Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life  and 

Character. 

1.  Past  and  Present 276 

2.  Facing  Initial  Difficulties 279 

3.  The  Consciousness  of  Worth 284 

4.  The  Courage  of  Conviction 286 

5.  The  Sense  of  Humor,  Pathos,  and  Romance 288 

XIV.  Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene. 

1.  Importance  of  Attention  to  Hygiene 296 

2.  Influence  of  Health  on  Character  and  Temperament. .  . .  297 

3.  The  Inner  World  of  Thought  and  Feeling  Acted  on  by 

the  Outer  World 298 

4.  Health  and  Longevity  Largely  within  the  Limits  of  Indi- 

vidual Control 301 

5.  Moral  Value  to  the  Minister  of  Sound  Bodily  Health.. . .  303 

6.  Notable  Instances  of  Early  Physical  Breakdown 304 

7.  Necessity  of  Regular  and  Systematic  Exercise 310 

8.  Benefits  Secured  Amply  Compensate  for  Cost  in  Time  . .  311 

9.  Errors  to  be  Shunned 313 

10.  Physical  Gifts  and  Graces  not  to  be  Despised 315 

XV.  The  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death. 

1.  Retiring  to  the  Shadows 316 

2.  Premature  Senility 3^7 

3.  Verdure  and  Sunshine  on  Autumn  Hills 319 

4.  The  Glow  of  Sunset 328 

5.  He  Being  Dead  yet  Speaketh 333 


ECCE   CLERUS 

OR 

The  Christian  Minister  in  Many  Lights 


CHAPTER  I 


The  Cfinstian  Ministry  Considered  as  a  Factor  in  the 
Qvilization  of  the  World 

Christ  came.  The  soul  the  most  full  of  love,  the  most  sacredly  virtuous, 
the  most  deeply  inspired  by  God  and  the  future  that  men  have  yet  seen  on 
earth ;  Jesus.  He  bent  over  the  corpse  of  the  dead  world  and  whispered  a 
word  of  faith  ;  over  the  clay  that  had  lost  all  of  man  but  the  movement  and 
the  form ;  he  uttered  words  until  then  unknown — love,  sacrifice,  a  heavenly 
origin.  And  the  dead  arose.  A  new  life  circulated  through  the  clay  which 
philosophy  had  tried  in  vain  to  reanimate.  From  that  corpse  arose  the  Chris- 
tian world  ;  the  world  of  liberty  and  equality.  From  that  clay  arose  the  true 
man,  the  image  of  God,  the  precursor  of  humanity.  —Joseph  Mazzini. 

J.  The  Birth  of  a  New  Moral  Force, 

The  birth  of  Christian  civilization,  properly  so  called, 
was  coincident  with  the  beginning  of  preaching,  and  the 
leading  factor  in  the  moral  and  intellectual  progress  of 
mankind,  since  the  hour  when  "times  of  refreshing"  began 
to  be  given  "  from  the  presence  of  the  Lord,"  has  been  the 
Christian  ministry  in  all  that  wide  and  varied  field  of  activ- 
ity and  conquest  in  which  it  has  progressively  unfurled  the 
flag  of  occupation.  The  walls  of  the  "  City  of  God  "  (^ 
txoXlo  7\  ayia  of  St.  John)  only  began  to  be  builded  when 
the  fisherman  Simon,  having  discovered  by  dint  of  superior 
prophetic  insight  the  superhuman  nature  and  quality  of  its 
great  Corner  Stone,  exhorted  his  expatriated  co-religionists, 

18 


14  Ecce  Clerus 

many  of  whom  had  been  drawn  to  Jerusalem  from  their 
far-away  homes  for  the  celebration  of  the  feasts  of  Passover 
and  Pentecost,  to  take  advantage  of  the  favored  moment 
that  was  upon  them  to  secure  a  personal  and  experimental 
initiation  into  **  the  mysteries  of  the  kingdom  of  God." 

The  special  feature  which  was  permanently  to  distinguish 
the  Christian  Church  and  the  new  order  of  things  it  repre- 
sented, not  only  from  the  temple  and  synagogue  and  the 
social  and  religious  ideas  for  which  they  stood,  but  also 
from  the  philosophical  schools  and  religious  cults  of  pagan- 
ism, was  the  revival,  rehabilitation,  and  wider  distribution 
of  the  prophetic  faculty  of  which  in  the  Jewish  Church 
there  had  been  no  trace  for  hundreds  of  years.  Careful 
students  and  diligent  redactors  of  the  inspired  records  like 
Ezra  had  not  been  wanting.  Distinguished  scholars  like 
Simon  the  Just,  Hillel,  Shammai,  and  Gamaliel  had  ap- 
peared. Pious  patriots  like  the  Maccabees,  daring  and  de- 
vout enthusiasts  like  Bar-Cochba,  saintly  souls  like  the  aged 
Simeon,  whose  attitude  of  prayer  and  earnestness  of  hope 
prepared  them  to  perceive  and  welcome  the  earliest  rays  of 
Him  who  was  to  be  at  once  a  light  lifting  the  veil  of  dark- 
ness from  the  nations  (^wf  eig  dnoKaXv^iv  ei9vd)v)  and  the 
consolation  and  glory  of  his  people  Israel — of  these,  also, 
there  had  been  many  during  the  post-exilic  ages  ;  but  there 
had  been  no  soul  endowed  with  the  penetrating  insight  and 
bold  utterance  of  the  ancient  seer — with  that  liberty  and 
faculty  of  prophesying  which  is  the  first  essential  qualifica- 
tion of  the  Christian  herald  and  teacher,  enabling  him  to 
influence  the  life,  thought,  and  motive  of  the  individual  and 
the  community  at  their  hidden  springs.  The  nation  in  its  age 
of  decrepitude  had  wandered  for  more  than  four  hundred 
years  in  a  moral  and  intellectual  desert,  barer  and  drearier 
than  that  in  which,  according  to  its  traditional  and  accepted 
records,  it  had  spent  forty  years  of  its  youth.  During  this  un- 
productive period  men  had  been   subsisting  timidly  and 


The  Christian  Ministry  IS 

doubtfully  on  the  sacred  depositum  of  the  past — on  manna 
grown  stale  and  innutritive  with  age.  The  ripest  wisdom  of 
those  gloomy  centuries  found  expression  in  the  three  cautious 
and  conservative  principles  attributed  to  the  men  of  the  Great 
Assembly:  "Be  discreet  in  judging;  train  up  many  scholars; 
make  a  hedge  around  the  law."  As  Bishop  Westcott  re- 
marks :  "  The  fence  was  necessary  because  the  law  was  not 
only  fixed,  but  dying.  Religion  seemed  capable  of  being 
defined  by  rule  ;  duty  had  ceased  to  be  infinite."*  The 
sorrows  and  disappointments  already  encountered  not  only 
gave  a  somber  color  and  complexion  to  the  passing  phase 
of  national  history,  but  also  tinctured  with  melancholy  and 
despair  every  forecast  of  the  future. 

And  not  alone  in  the  dismal  traditions  of  the  Talmud,  but 
in  the  apocryphal  literature  also,  this  spirit  of  apprehension 
and  despondency  is  apparent.  "  Behold,"  says  the  author 
of  the  (so-called)  Fourth  Book  of  Esdras,  "  the  days  shall 
come  that  .  .  .  the  way  of  truth  shall  be  hidden  and  the 
land  shall  be  destitute  of  faith  {sierilis  erit  a  fide) .  .  .  .  Then 
shall  wit  hide  itself  and  understanding  withdraw  into  secret 

chambers,  and  shall  be  sought  of  many  and  yet  not  found 

For  the  world  hath  lost  his  youth  and  the  times  begin  to  wax 
old."  f  No  more  was  the  living  prophetic  word  spoken 
for  the  edification,  guidance,  comfort  of  the  people  of  God. 
The  light  of  inspiration  was  withdrawn.  The  seer's  vision 
had  vanished.     The  sacred  oracle  was  dumb. 

Beyond  the  pale  of  Judaism  "  outer  darkness  "  was  the 
phrase  not  inaptly  applied  to  the  moral  and  social  condition  of 
the  nations.  In  the  course  of  the  seven  centuries  that  had 
passed  since  the  founding  of  the  city,  Rome  had  marched 
her  legions  from  the  Tiber  to  the  Rhine  and  the  Danube 
in  the  north,  and  had  made  herself  mistress  of  the  fair  and 
fruitful  regions  lying  between  those  rivers.  Southward 
she  had  extended  her  empire  as  far  as  Mount  Atlas  and  the 

*  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  the  Gospels,  p.  6i.        t  Ibid.^  p.  iii. 


16  Ecce  Clerus 

cataracts  of  the  Nile ;  west  and  east  from  the  waves  of  the 
Atlantic  to  the  banks  of  the  Euphrates.  Universal  empire 
was  her  ambition,  and  war  and  conquest  the  means  ruth- 
lessly employed  to  gratify  it.  During  the  thirty  years  of 
our  Lord's  quiet  and  secluded  life  in  Nazareth  the  theater 
of  war  extended  over  considerable  portions  of  Asia  and 
Africa,  and  the  Emperor  Tiberius  found  nothing  worthier 
of  his  restless  energy  than  holding  Europe,  from  the  Adri- 
atic Sea  to  the  skirts  of  the  Black  Forest,  in  the  flames  of  a 
deadly,  continuous,  all-consuming  strife.* 

And  the  people  who  were  harassed  and  plundered  by 
Rome  in  time  of  war  were  hardly  worse  off  than  those  who 
were  ruled  by  her  in  times  of  peace.  Romans  of  the  patri- 
cian grade  who  had  squandered  their  patrimony  and  private 
fortunes  by  dissipation  in  the  city  were  accustomed  to  look 
to  proconsulship  in  the  provinces  as  a  means  of  replenish- 
ing their  exhausted  treasures  and  retrieving  their  social 
position.  Leaving  Rome  deeply  involved  in  debt,  they 
often  in  three  years — the  limit  of  their  term  of  service — re- 
turned home  the  envied  possessors  of  enormous  wealth. 
They  were  allowed  to  prey  upon  the  defenseless  peoples 
without  check  or  restraint,  and  grew  rich  by  extortion  and 
fraud,  f  When  Tiberius  asked  Bato  the  Dalmatian  why 
he  made  war  on  the  Romans  the  brave  barbarian  indig- 
nantly replied,  "  You  aff"ect  to  treat  every  nation  as  your 
flocks  and  your  property,  but  you  intrust  the  care  of  them 
to  ravenous  wolves  and  not  to  shepherds  and  their  dogs." 
The  masters  of  the  world  oppressed  and  fleeced  the  van- 
quished races  over  whom  they  exercised  control,  and  for 
their  temerity  often  had  to  pay  dearly  out  of  the  best 
blood  of  their  free  citizens.  "O  tempora!  O mores!"  is 
Cicero's  lament  over  the  social  and  political  degeneracy  of 

*  See  A.  Ferguson,  History  of  the  Roman  Repuilic,  p.  444. 

t  See  art.  *'  The  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire,"  by  Thomas  Hodgkin,  in  Contemporary 
Review,  January,  1898. 


The  Christian  Ministry  17 

an  age  of  which  Sallust's  Sempronia  and  his  own  relentless 
and  unprincipled  adversary,  Cataline,  were  unexaggerated 
types.*  "  Hardly  any  of  the  elements  of  an  unsound  state 
of  society  were  absent/'f 

Upon  such  a  condition  of  affairs  both  within  and  outside 
the  household  of  the  chosen  people  there  suddenly  broke 
from  the  Judean  wilderness  the  startling  announcement  of 
the  herald  of  the  New  Covenant :  "  The  time  is  fulfilled ; 
the  kingdom  of  God  is  at  hand.  Repent  ye  and  believe  the 
good  news."  The  dispensation  of  the  Christian  prophet  and 
proclaimer  (Krjpv^)  had  dawned.  At  the  very  outstart  of 
his  great  work  of  "  preparing  the  way  of  the  Lord  "  the 
Baptist  proved  the  genuineness  of  his  commission  quite  as 
much  by  his  tender  reverence  for  the  truth,  purity,  and 
beauty  of  the  past  as  by  his  courageous  and  condemnatory 
attitude  toward  the  sin  and  error  of  the  present.  He  at 
once  set  suspicion  at  rest  by  assuming  the  integrity  and  con- 
tinuity of  God's  purpose,  and  by  exemplifying  in  himself  the 
close  and  vital  relation  that  subsists  between  the  successive 
stages  of  God's  work  through  all  the  world's  ages.  He  took 
up  the  broken  thread  of  prophecy  just  where  it  had  been 
dropped.  In  his  dress,  diet,  and  chosen  haunts,  as  well  as 
in  his  teaching,  he  harked  back  to  an  earlier  time,  recalling 
the  striking  figure,  the  simple  manner,  the  heroic  spirit,  and 
the  divine  mission  of  Elijah.  While  showing  that  the  old 
prophetic  word  had  a  wider  scope  and  a  deeper  import  than 
had  heretofore  been  thought  of,  he  claimed  for  it  at  least  a 
partial  and  provisional  fulfillment  in  what  was  taking  place 
around  him.  The  Gospel  dispensation,  with  its  roots  in  the 
past,  was  the  introduction  of  a  new  order  of  things.  It  in- 
augurated the  reign  of  moral  forces.  Through  its  simple 
and  unostentatious  ministry  it  placed  before  the  eyes  of  men 
the  most  exalted  of  ethical  ideals,  and  subjected  the  popular 

*  Oraiio  Prima.     Contra  Cat. 

t  E.  Hatch,  D.D.,  Organization  of  the  Early  Christian  Churches^  p.  3a, 

2 


18  Ecce  Clerus 

mind  to  the  direct  action  of  the  noblest  and  most  elevating 
of  intellectual  and  spiritual  influences  in  a  manner  and  to  a 
degree  never  before  possible.  It  was  essentially  a  call  to 
repentance. 

2*  A  New  and  Nobler  Doctrine  of  Human  Destiny. 

To  mold  the  living  character  and  control  the  present  con- 
duct of  mankind  by  means  of  motives  mainly  drawn  from  a 
world  out  of  sight  had  always  been  a  difficult  undertaking, 
and  one  which,  so  far  as  it  had  been  tried,  had  never  been 
attended  with  any  marked  success.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
during  the  Old  Testament  ages  the  experiment  had  seldom 
or  never  been  attempted  on  any  appreciable  scale.  The 
considerations  by  which  poet,  priest,  prophet,  and  lawgiver 
had  endeavored  to  move  men  to  sentiments  of  piety  and 
praiseworthy  moral  exertions  were  almost  exclusively  of  a 
temporal  nature.  The  strain  of  exhortation  invariably  ran 
as  in  the  extremely  beautiful  words  of  Eliphaz  the  Temanite 
in  the  Book  of  Job:  "Acquaint  now  thyself  with  him,  and  be 
at  peace:  thereby  good  shall  come  unto  thee  [mark  what 
kind  of  good].  Receive,  I  pray  thee,  the  law  from  his 
mouth,  and  lay  up  his  words  in  thine  heart.  If  thou  return 
to  the  Almighty,  thou  shalt  be  built  up,  thou  shalt  put  away 
iniquity  far  from  thy  tabernacles.  Then  shalt  thou  lay  up 
gold  as  dust,  and  the  gold  of  Ophir  as  the  stones  of  the 
brooks.  Yea,  the  Almighty  shall  be  thy  defense,  and  thou 
shalt  have  plenty  of  silver.  For  then  shalt  thou  have  thy 
delight  in  the  Almighty,  and  shalt  lift  up  thy  face  unto  God. 
Thou  shalt  make  thy  prayer  unto  him,  and  he  shall  answer 
thee,  and  thou  shalt  pay  thy  vows.  Thou  shalt  also  decree 
a  thing,  and  it  shall  be  established  unto  thee:  and  the  light 
shall  shine  upon  thy  ways."  * 

*  Job  xxii.  21-30.  To  whatever  period  in  the  development  of  the  Old  Testament 
literature  this  noblest  of  ancient  poems  may  be  assigned,  it  still  remains  a  typical  ex- 
pression of  the  ethical  spirit  of  the  Hebrew  people  during  the  whole  of  their  eventful 
nistory. 


The  Christian  Ministry  19 

Rare  were  the  souls  who  were  capable  of  discerning  the 
inner  beauty  and  intrinsic  blessedness  of  the  divine  service, 
of  perceiving  the  limitless  scope  it  offers  for  the  growth 
and  development  of  man's  higher  nature,  and  of  choosing  it 
for  its  own  sake,  regardless  of  its  apparent  temporal  disad- 
vantages, on  the  one  hand,  or  its  obvious  present  recom- 
pense, on  the  other.  But  the  capability  of  appreciating  this 
loftier  plea  of  faith — the  argument  drawn  exclusively  from 
the  nature,  needs,  dignity,  and  unmeasured  capacity  of  the 
soul — and  of  building  on  the  higher  ground  is  to  be  the  rule 
rather  than  the  exception  under  the  regime  of  him  who  has 
"  brought  life  and  immortality  to  light  through  his  Gospel." 
Those  who  habitually  think  and  act  in  presence  of  the 
eternal  future,  and  in  lively  anticipation  of  its  promised 
good,  are  to  have,  by  virtue  of  their  spiritual  insight  and 
elevation,  the  greatest  power  to  influence  and  control  the 
present.  The  princes  of  the  spiritual  empire  are  they  who 
steadily  subordinate  the  visible  to  the  invisible,  the  essen- 
tially provisional  to  the  essentially  permanent.  The  wisest 
and  noblest  are  ordained  to  reign.  The  meek  are  to  inherit 
the  earth  ;  the  saints  are  to  judge  the  world. 

3.  The  Prcachcr^s  Distinctive  Gift. 

The  preacher's  significance  and  value,  therefore,  for  his 
particular  age — his  power  to  mold  its  life  and  thought — lies 
in  the  fact  that  as  one  possessing  prophetic  and  interpretive 
insight,  he  is  authorized  boldly  to  proclaim  the  mind  and 
will  of  God,  He  discerns  in  the  interminable  and  appar- 
ently aimless  conflict  in  which  generation  after  generation 
eagerly  expends  its  thought  and  energy,  the  working  of 
eternal  principles  which  make  for  righteousness,  and  is  able  to 
forecast  and  foretell  the  general  issue  with  absolute  certainty. 
He  looks  far  behind  him  for  hints  of  action  and  clews  of  guid- 
ance, and  far  before  him  for  his  goal.  He  sees,  as  it  were, 
the  dark  veil  that  persistently  clings  to  the  face  of  things 


20  Ecce  Clerus 

partially  removed,  so  that  the  grand  motives  and  issues  of 
life  stand  disclosed  in  their  eternal  nature.  For  him  spirit- 
ual truth,  moral  beauty,  enduring  blessedness,  though  con- 
cealed, yet  essentially  exist  beneath  the  suffering,  sorrow, 
sin,  and  disorder  which  are  spread  over  the  world  within  and 
the  world  without — over  man  and  over  nature.  In  the  in- 
carnate Son  of  God  he  sees  the  great  Prophet  of  all  time. 
In  his  spotless  and  perfect  humanity  he  sees  the  glorious 
possibility  which  lies  back  of  all  the  degradation,  igno- 
rance, and  misery  of  the  race.  He  discerns  in  him  who 
"lighteth  every  man  coming  into  the  world"  the  true  moral 
dignity  and  completeness  of  man's  nature,  and  is  encour- 
aged to  hope  for  his  restoration  to  personal  holiness  and  to 
perfect  harmony  with  God.  Studying  carefully  the  great 
moral  conflict  going  on  around  him,  he  perceives,  with  in- 
creasing vividness,  the  spirits  of  men,  their  motives  and 
aims,  the  springs  of  individual  and  national  life,  till  all  the 
relations  of  time  no  longer  exist  in  his  vision,  till  all  passing 
strife  is  referred  to  the  final  conflict  of  good  and  evil,  fore- 
shadowed in  the  great  judgments  of  the  world,  and  all  hope 
is  centered  in  the  triumph  of  Christ  and  in  the  completion 
and  fullness  of  his  kingdom.  He  thus  draws  hope  and  in- 
spiration from  the  certainties  of  the  future  in  fighting  the 
seemingly  doubtful  battle  of  the  present.  He  appeals  "from 
Philip  drunk  to  Philip  sober  ;  "  from  the  delusive  dream  and 
specious  appearance  of  the  moment  to  the  eternal  reality; 
meanwhile  resting  confidently  in  the  grand  conviction  of 

One  God,  one  law,  one  element, 
And  one  far-off  divine  event 
To  which  the  whole  creation  moves. 

4.  The  Secret  of  His  Power. 

And  precisely  in  proportion  to  the  closeness  and  fidelity 
with  which  the  influence  of  the  preacher  on  the  intellectual 
problems  and  social  and  political  life  of  his  time  has  con- 


The  Christian  Ministry  21 

formed  to  the  type  of  Christ  it  has  been  deep,  all-pervasive, 
fruitful,  and  enduring. 

Offering  himself  freely  for  service  or  sacrifice,  as  the  bond- 
slave (6  SovXog)  *  of  his  Master,  he  has  been,  in  proportion 
to  the  completeness  of  his  self-subjugation  and  self-sur- 
render, the  salt  of  society  and  the  salvation  and  enrichment 
of  the  world.  He  has  won  an  empire  whose  scepter  has 
not  dropped  from  his  grasp  with  the  dissolution  of  his 
earthly  being.  His  influence  for  good,  as  one  who  has 
worthily  occupied  a  place,  however  lowly  and  obscure,  in 
"  the  glorious  company  of  the  prophets,"  abides.  Like  the 
morning  star,  his  modest  fame  does  not  go  down 

Behind  the  darkened  west, 
Nor  hide  obscure  amid  the  tempests  of  the  sky, 
But  melts  away  into  the  light  of  heaven. 

He  ascends  to  join  the  "  choir  invisible  "  and  take  rank  with 

Those  immortal  dead  who  live  again 
In  minds  made  better  by  their  presence ;  live 
In  pulses  stirred  to  generosity, 
In  deeds  of  daring  rectitude  ;  in  scorn 
Of  miserable  aims  that  end  with  self ; 
In  thoughts  sublime  that  pierce  the  night  like  stars, 
And  with  their  mild  persistence  urge  men's  minds 
To  vaster  issues. 

His  allotted  sphere  has  been  now  narrow  and  circumscribed, 
confined  to  the  care  of  a  handful  of  souls ;  now  indefinitely 
extended  so  as  to  be  ecumenical,  including  "all  people 
that  on  earth  do  dwell,"  like  the  wisest  and  the  noblest 
of  the  popes  of  Rome.  He  has  spoken  for  the  instruction 
of  mankind  from  within  the  walls  of  a  prison,  like  St,  Paul 
from  the  traditional  Mamertine,  or  Bunyan  from  the  over- 
crowded and  insalubrious  dungeon  that  once  stood  on  the 
piers  of  the  old  Ouse  bridge  at  Bedford,  or  St.  Cyran,  en- 
couraging, counseling,  directing,  the  Port  Royalists   from 

*  This  is  the  significant  and  deliberately  chosen  term  used  by  the  apostles  to  express 
their  personal  relation  to  Christ.  Christianity  dignified  service.  _  A  word  which  signi- 
fied the  lowept  degradation  among  men  became,  under  its  teaching,  a  term  of  highest 
honor  in  the  kingdom  of  God. 


22  Ecce  Clerus 

his  captivity  at  Vincennes.  He  has  found  his  chosen  em- 
pire in  some  dismal  cave,  like  St.  Jerome's  retreat  at  Beth- 
lehem, or  in  some  lonesome  haunt  of  the  forest,  like  that  of 
Peter  the  Hermit  near  mediaeval  Amiens.  He  has  been 
hunted  into  exile  like  Cyprian,  Athanasius,  and  Chrysostom. 
He  has  voluntarily  immured  himself  within  the  walls  of  a 
monastery,  self-bound  thereto  by  ascetic  vow,  or  romantic 
sentiment,  or  religious  love  of  solitude  stronger  than  chains 
or  bars  or  doors  of  iron,  like  the  earlier  and  later  founders 
of  the  Benedictine  rule,  like  the  Bernards  of  Clairvaux 
and  Cluny  and  the  lofty  souls  that  made  Port  Royal  famous, 
such  as  Arnauld  and  Pascal.  He  has  found  the  weapon  of 
his  spiritual  warfare  in  the  gift  of  tongues  or  the  translator's 
pen,  like  the  author  of  the  Vulgate,  the  Gothic  Bishop  Ul- 
philas,  Wyclif,  Tyndale,  Luther,  and  the  learned  and  devout 
De  Saci,  who  toiled  for  years  at  his  incomparable  French 
version  amid  the  gloom  of  the  Bastile.  He  has  constructed 
systems  of  theology  which  have  tinctured  the  faith,  colored 
the  creeds,  and  controlled  the  thought  of  Christendom  for 
centuries,  like  Augustine,  Aquinas,  Anselm,  and  Calvin.  He 
has  contributed  to  the  growing  light  and  freedom  of  the 
world  from  the  pulpit,  like  the  "  Golden-mouth  "  of  Antioch 
and  Byzantium,  like  Basil,  Savonarola,  Knox,  Whitefield, 
and  Chalmers ;  or  from  the  bishop's  throne,  like  Leo  I, 
Gregory  I,  and  Gregory  VH;  or  from  the  professor's  chair, 
like  Melanchthon  at  Wittenburg,  with  two  thousand  of  the 
noblest  youth  of  Europe  at  his  feet,  and  Arminius  at  Ley- 
den,  elaborating,  amid  the  fierce  fires  of  enmity  and  intem- 
perate controversy,  a  reasonable  and  credible  doctrine  of 
God  and  of  redemption  for  the  religious  mind  of  our  time,  and 
Schleiermacher  in  Berlin  recalling  the  attention  of  his  coun- 
trymen to  the  heart  and  essence  of  religion  in  his  Reden  uber 
die  Religion,  thus  reviving  for  a  moment  the  dying  faith  of 
the  Fatherland,  and  Neander  in  the  same  university  resist- 
ing the  onslaught  of  Tubingen  criticism  with  its  own  chosen 


The  Christian  Ministry  23 

weapons.  He  has  relieved  the  cares  and  sorrows  of  the 
hearthstone  and  brought  a  ray  of  heavenly  light  to  the  bed- 
side of  the  sick  and  dying,  like  Richard  Baxter,  Samuel 
Rutherford,  and  Jonathan  Edwards,  and  a  thousand  other 
faithful  pastors  who  have  played  the  part  of  '*  sons  of  con- 
solation "  to  their  people.  He  has  organized  world-embrac- 
ing crusades  for  the  salvation  of  the  neglected  masses  of 
the  people,  like  General  Booth  ;  or  started  an  evangelizing 
impulse  which  remains  unspent  after  the  lapse  of  a  hundred 
and  fifty  years,  like  John  Wesley.  He  has  made  the  world 
better  and  brighter  for  the  songs  he  has  sung,  like  George 
Herbert,  Isaac  Watts,  John  Newton,  Bishop  Ken,  John 
Keble,  and  Charles  Wesley,  whose  hymns  have  helped  to 
enrich  the  religious  life  and  experience  of  thousands.  By 
the  force  of  his  character  as  a  spiritual  man,  by  the  depth 
and  strength  of  his  convictions  as  a  diligent  student  of  God's 
word,  by  the  loftiness  of  his  calling  as  the  spokesman  of 
heaven,  by  the  intimate  relation  between  his  official  duties 
and  the  most  vital  concerns  of  those  who  have  confided  in 
him  as  their  spiritual  counselor  and  guide,  he  has  been  able 
to  mold  individual  character,  to  influence  public  sentiment, 
and  to  largely  shape  the  destiny  of  nations.  He  has  been 
the  steadfast  friend  of  popular  enlightenment,  freedom,  and 
reform,  and  the  foe  alike  of  private  wickedness  and  public 
wrong.  He  has  enriched  the  world's  literature  with  books 
of  lasting  fame  and  value,  has  averted  social  and  political 
disaster,  crowned  and  discrowned  kings,*  arrested  the  tri- 
umphant march  of  conquerors,f  and  made  powerful  tyrants 

*  Apart  from  the  subjugation  of  Henry  IV  bjr  Hildebrand,  "  a  king  of  England  con- 
sented to  hold  his  kingdom  as  a  fief  from  the  pontiffs  hand  .  .  .  a  king  of  Aragon  resigned 
his  realms  to  the  apostle  Peter,  and  Naples  beheld  her  throne  conferred  by  the  same 
all-commanding  power  on  a  family  wholly  foreign  to  her  soil." — Ranke's  History  of 
the  Popes,  vol.  i,  p.  23. 

t  '"Already  Attila  had  reduced  Aquileia  to  a  heap  of  ruins  and  driven  her  people  to 
seek  shelter  for  themselves  in  the  lagoons  of  the  Adriatic,  where  they  founded  the  fa- 
mous city  of  Venice.  He  now  resolved  to  force  his  way  over  the  Apennines  .  .  .  and 
pass  in  vengeful  triumph  up  the  sacred  way  which  had  seen  the  imperial  people  trample 
for  so  many  centuries  upon  the  necks  of  barbaric  kings.  Rome,  however,  deemed  it 
best  to  anticipate  Attila's  arrival,  and  sent  an  embassy  to  deprecate  the  victor's  wrath. 


24  Ecce  Clems 

turn  pale  and  tremble  at  his  words.*  He  has  not  talked 
about  new  heavens  and  a  new  earth  "  wherein  dwelleth 
righteousness "  without  putting  forth  strenuous  personal 
efforts  to  realize  the  golden  dream,  nor  gone  about  with 
preoccupied  air,  ultra-solemn  mood  and  mien,  cold,  narrow, 
self-absorbed,  supramundane,  intolerant  of  the  erring,  im- 
patient of  the  weak,  indifferent  to  the  anxieties  and  sorrows 
of  the  poor,  contemptuous  of  the  sins  and  follies  of  the 
proud  and  powerful,  as  if  he  were  something  far 

too  wise  or  good 
For  human  nature's  daily  food.f 

There  have  been  occasionally  prominent  in  the  ministry 
and  service  of  the  Church,  it  is  true,  men  of  earthly  and 
alien  spirit,  swayed  by  the  love  of  power  and  public  fame, 
fond  of  the  tinsel  and  glitter  of  material  wealth,  of  social 
prestige  and  distinction,  preferring  "  fleshly  wisdom  "  to 
the  "  simplicity  of  Christ,"  and  willing,  in  despite  of  that  apos- 
tolic touchstone,  "As  many  as  are  led  by  the  Spirit  of  God 
they  are  the  sons  of  God,"  to  employ  the  dubious  arts  of 
intrigue,  diplomacy,  and  double  dealing.  There  have  been 
shepherds  of  crime  and  blood  and  violence  like  Alexander 
Borgia,  Julius  II,  Clement  VII,  and  Innocent  III,  who  of- 
fered thanks  publicly  to  heaven  for  the  massacre  of  the 
Huguenots;  and  successors  of  St.  Peter  steeped  in  low, 
sensual  pleasures  like  Leo  X — men  who  have  brought  dis- 

the  principal  place  in  which  was  occupied  by  the  venerable  pontiff  Leo  I,  canonized 
by  the  Church  of  Rome  with  the  name  of  '  Great.'  Leo  was  a  man  of  rare  ability,  elo- 
quence, firmness,  and  knowledge  of  the  times.  In  the  curious  taste  of  his  day  he  was 
styled  the  Cicero  of  Catholic  rhetoric,  the  Homer  of  theology,"  etc. — Sheppard's  Fall 
of  Rome,  p.  207. 

♦  Lorenzo  de'  Medici  entreating  Savonarola  to  moderate  the  tone  of  his  denunciations 
is  a  case  in  point. 

_t  A  stenographic  report  of  a  speech  delivered  in  Wilmington,  Del.,  by  a  recent  can- 
didate for  tne  presidency  of  the  United  States  makes  him  to  use  the  following  lan- 
guage of  "some  ministers  of  the  Gospel:"  "Tell  them  the  people  are  hungry  and 
starving,  and  that  men  out  of  work  are  driven  into  crime,  and  they  cannot  understand 
why  everybody  is  not  as  well  off  as  they  are.  .  .  .  The  common  people  were  never 
aided  in  their  struggle  upward  by  those  who  were  so  far  beyond  them  that  they  could 
not  feel  their  needs  and  sympathize  with  their  distress."  _  The  character  here  alluded 
to  has  always  existed,  especially  in  prosperous  and  luxurious  times,  but  everything  is 
against  his  ever  becoming  a  prevailing  type. 


The  Christian  Ministry  25 

credit  on  their  profession  and  reproach  and  scandal  to  the 
Church.  There  have  been  those  who,  while  publicly  and 
professionally  magnifying  divine  truths  and  exalting  spirit- 
ual virtues  as  worthy  always  of  an  immediate  and  prime 
consideration,  have  personally  treated  them  as  of  less  than 
second-rate  consequence,  thus  producing  irritation,  resent- 
ment, and  confusion  in  men's  minds,  or  bringing  about  the 
still  worse  result  of  swelling  the  ranks  of  the  already  large 
army  of  cynics,  infidels,  and  atheists,  and  giving  pertinence 
to  the  words  addressed  by  Ophelia  to  her  brother  Laertes, 
when  he  sought  with  some  excellent  counsels  to  fortify  her 
virtue  and  womanhood  against  possible  temptation  : 

I  shall  the  effect  of  this  good  lesson  keep, 

As  watchman  to  my  heart.     But,  good  my  brother, 

Do  not,  as  some  ungracious  pastors  do, 

Show  me  the  steep  and  thorny  way  to  heaven  ; 

Whiles  like  a  puffed  and  reckless  libertine. 

Himself  the  primrose  path  of  dalliance  treads, 

And  recks  not  his  own  rede. 

Of  these  hirelings  of  the  fold  it  may  be  affirmed  that  they 
entered  not  by  the  door  of  the  sheep,  but  climbed  up  some 
other  way.  Their  claim  to  a  recognized  place  in  the  great 
brotherhood  of  believers  is  disputed,  and  an  impartial  yet 
exacting  posterity  offers  to  their  memory  nothing  but  the 
doubtful  tribute  of  a  sincere  regret  that,  sharing  the  honor 
of  the  loftiest  calling  and  the  stimulus  of  the  greatest  possi- 
bilities, they  despised  their  day  of  opportunity  and  played 
the  part  of  the  unworthy. 

5*  Notable  Examples. 

That  the  force  and  effectiveness  of  the  Christian  religion 
as  a  civilizing  factor  has  ever  been  proportioned  to  the 
fidelity  of  its  ministry  and  discipleship  to  its  central  idea — 
its  one  imperative  requirement — a  severe  and  self-restrain- 
ing yet  self-oblivious  and  cheerful  purity  of  heart  and  life, 
history  bears  ample  and  indisputable  witness.     Herein  has 


26  Ecce  Clerus 

lain  the  simple  and  sure  solution  of  every  problem — social, 
industrial,  ethical,  religious — that  has  seriously  engaged  the 
attention  and  thought  of  mankind.  The  quiet  and  unos- 
tentatious martyrdom  or  witness-bearing  of  noble  natures 
such  as  Wesley,  Spurgeon,  Finney,  Miiller,  has  given  men 
within  the  limits  of  a  human  lifetime  a  deeper  and  truer 
estimate  of  the  practical  value  of  truth  and  righteousness 
than  science,  philosophy,  and  theology  combined,  supported 
by  all  the  aids  and  arts  of  eloquence  and  the  powerful 
prestige  and  sanction  of  the  schools,  have  imparted  in  the 
course  of  centuries.  The  world  owes,  to-day,  a  deeper 
debt  of  gratitude  to  the  man  who,  clad  in  the  coarse  garb 
of  the  desert  and  sustained  by  its  homely  fare,  said,  at  the 
cost  of  his  head,  to  a  licentious  despot,  "  It  is  not  law- 
ful for  thee  to  have  her,"  than  to  the  man  who  stood  in 
holy  places,  wore  sacred  vestments,  was  the  recipient  of 
great  public  veneration  as  the  high-priestly  head  of  the 
Jewish  Church,  and  saw  the  authority  of  the  "ten  holy 
words  "  trampled  in  the  dust  without  a  syllable  of  protest. 
And  while  among  the  most  precious  of  the  world's  literary 
treasures,  sacred  or  profane,  none  has  a  higher  value  than 
the  writings  of  the  man  who  esteemed  himself  "  less  than 
the  least  of  all  saints,"  the  world  has  been  willing  to  forget 
the  very  name  of  the  magnate  to  whom  unwittingly,  in  a 
moment  of  noble  indignation,  he  said,  "  God  shall  smite 
thee,  thou  whited  wall."  *  The  royal  science  of  religious 
thought,  not  less  than  the  present  spiritual  condition  of 
Christendom,  is  more  indebted  to  Athanasius,  harassed,  per- 
secuted, impoverished,  evil-spoken  of,  three  times  banished 
from  his  attached  people  and  from  the  work  he  loved  so 
well,  than  to  the  tall,  handsome,  eloquent  presbyter  f  whose 

♦Acts  xxiii,  3. 

t  By  orthodox  writers  of  this  day  Anus  is  described  as  tall  of  stature,  with  a  down- 
cast look,  and  "  a  figure  composed  like  that  of  a  subtle  serpent  to  deceive  the  guileless 
by  his  crafty  exterior."  Epiphanius  speaks  of  him  as  simple  in  his  attire,  with  an 
address  "  soft  and  smooth,  calculated  to  persuade  and  attract,  so  that  he  had  drawn 


The  Christian  Ministry  27 

praises  were  sung  in  the  streets,  in  serio-comic  strains  of  his 
own  composing,  by  the  women  and  children  of  Alexandria.* 
As  far  as  a  fragrant  memory  and  an  enduring  fame  are 
concerned,  there  are  few  persons  who  would  not  prefer  the 
fate  of  the  devout,  labor-loving,  narrow-minded  Cyprian, 
obliged  on  account  of  the  Decian  and  later  persecutions  to 
supervise  his  diocese  from  a  place  of  concealment,!  and 
ultimately  condemned  to  a  martyr's  death  as  an  enemy  to 
the  gods  of  Rome  and  her  religious  laws  {inimicus  Diis 
Ronianis  et  sacris  legidus),X  to  the  easy  and  luxurious  life 
of  the  affable,  diplomatic,  liberal-minded  Eusebius  of  Nico- 
media,  or  of  him  of  Caesarea,  basking  in  the  smiles  of  Con- 
stantine,  and  betraying  "  the  faith  once  delivered  to  the 
saints"  and  the  interests  of  the  "  kingdom  "  which  is  "not 
of  this  world "  into  the  hands  of  the  emperor  and  the 
ladies  of  the  imperial  court.  We  are  richer  at  this  hour  for 
the  life,  toil,  and  hardship  of  Jerome,  with  his  hermitlike  in- 
stincts, his  unremitting  ardor  in  the  pursuit  of  sacred  lore, 
his  fondness  for  study  and  retirement,  than  for  the  violence, 
cruelty,  intrigue,  and  restless  ambition  of  Cyril  of  Alexan- 
dria, whose  name  Milman  felt  obliged  to  brand  with  infamy, § 
and  whose  stern  spirit  and  stormy  methods  Charles  Kingsley 
has  so  vividly  depicted  in  Hypatia.  For  all  the  higher  in- 
terests of  morality  and  religion,  Bishop  Latimer,  sending 
a  New  Testament  to  his  concupiscent  and  crafty  sovereign, 

away  seven  hundred  virgins  from  the  Church  to  his  party."  We  may  accept  the  facts 
of  course,  without  the  sinister  hint  they  are  employed  to  convey. 

*  Athanasius  complained  of  Arius's  degradation  of  sacred  themes  in  his  Thalia. 
See  Orations  of  Athanasius  against  the  Arians,  edited  by  Dr.  William  Bright, 
Regius  Professor  of  Ecclesiastical  History,  Oxford. 

tNeander's  History  of  the  Christian  Religion  and  Church.     Fifth  edition,  p.  78. 

JPontus,  in  Vita  Cypriani,  p.  13.  Roman  jurists  distinguished  three  kinds  of  law — 
JUS  sacrum,  reli^fious  law  ;  jus  publicum ,  common  law,  and j'us  ^ivatum,  law  deter- 
mining private  rights.  So  the  celebrated  rhetorician  and  pleader  Quintilian  says 
"  {legum)  genera  sunt  tria:  sacri^ publiciy  privati juris." 

§  Toward  Jews,  pagans,  and  heretics,  or  what  he  considered  such,  Cyril  showed  no 
mercy.  Dean  Milman  thus  characterizes  him:  "He  may  be  a  hero  or  even  a  saint  to 
those  who  esteem  the  stern  and  uncompromising  assertion  of  certain  tenets  the  one 
paramount  Christian  virtue,  but  while  ambition,  intrigue,  arrogance,  rapacity,  and  vio- 
lence are  prescribed  as  unchristian  means;  barbarity,  persecution,  bloodshed  as  unholy 
and  unevangelical  wickedness,  posterity  will  condemn  the  orthodox  Cyril  as  one  of  the 
worst  of  heretics  against  the  spread  of  the  Gospel." — Latin  Christianity.,  vol.  i,  p.  145. 


28  Ecce  Clems 

Henry  VIII,  with  the  leaf  turned  down  and  the  page 
marked  at  the  words  "  Marriage  is  honorable  in  all,  and  the 
bed  undefiled  ;  but  whoremongers  and  adulterers  God  will 
judge,"  has  a  significance  and  a  value  that  a  thousand 
courtly  Wolseys,  humoring  their  imperious  and  headstrong 
master  in  his  whims  and  caprices  and  condoning  his  dark- 
est crimes,  could  never  pretend  to ;  while  the  triumphant 
martyrdom  of  the  faithful  bishop  was  the  most  fitting  an- 
tithesis to  the  final  shipwreck  and  shame  of  the  diplomatic 
and  aspiring  cardinal.  And  the  clerical  satellites  of  that 
most  dissolute  of  kings,  Charles  II,  learned,  witty,  and  bril- 
liant as  many  of  them  were,  will  never  be  named  with  the 
same  veneration  and  respect  by  posterity  as  the  gifted  and 
saintly  author  of  A  Good  Man  the  Living  Temple  of  God, 
who  left  the  far  more  exemplary  court  of  Cromwell  and  its 
lucrative  chaplaincy  because  of  the  unendurable  coarseness 
of  its  manners  and  the  insalubrity  of  its  moral  atmosphere, 
or  Bunyan,  who  during  the  same  reign  spent  twelve  of  the 
best  years  of  his  life  in  a  cell  of  the  county  jail,  though 
ranking  high  among  the  best  writers,  ablest  preachers,  and 
most  law-abiding  citizens  of  his  age.* 

The  names  of  the  great  preachers,  philanthropists,  eccle- 
siastical rulers,  and  reformers  of  history  are  not  recalled 
by  monuments  in  bronze  or  marble.  Their  true  memorial 
is  the  work  they  have  done  and  the  world  they  have 
bequeathed  to  the  generations  succeeding  them,  enriched 
and  ennobled  by  their  thought,  their  example,  and  their  la- 
bors. They  built  their  souls  into  their  work.  They 
stamped  their  personality  on  their  age  and  live  again  in 
minds  made  better  by  the  high  standard  they  personally 
honored  and  strove  to  establish.  And  the  brief  but  ex- 
pressive eulogy  to  Sir  Christopher  Wren,  which  the  visitor 


_*  Froude's  attempt  to  justify  the  legal  forms  under  which  Bunyan  was  deprived  of 
his  liberty  is  lame  and  inadequate.  See  Life  of  Bunyan,  in  English  Men  of  Letters 
Series. 


The  Christian  Ministry  29 

to  St.  Paul's  Cathedral  in  London,  the  noblest  of  the  many 
monuments  of  his  exhaustless  and  versatile  genius,  reads 
over  the  north  door  of  the  choir,  beneath  which  rest  his  re- 
mains :  ''''Lector  .  .  .  si  monumentum  requiris  circumsptce,"  * 
may  be  justly  applied  to  these  makers  of  the  world's  best 

ages. 

We  crave  not  a  memorial  stone 
For  those  who  fell  at  Marathon. 
Their  fame  with  every  breeze  is  blent ; 
The  mountains  are  their  monument, 
And  the  low  plaining  of  the  sea 
Their  everlasting  threnody.f 

6.  Measurable  Progress. 

To  seize  two  widely  distant  points  of  history  and  survey 
the  ground  between  them  which  has  been  traveled  over,  and 
note  the  progress  that  has  been  made  and  the  factors  that 
have  figured  most  prominently  in  the  transition  stages  and 
epochal  scenes  of  the  period,  will  often  give  a  striking  view 
of  the  potent  influence  exerted  on  the  civilization  of  the 
world  by  the  Christian  religion  and  the  men  who  have  ex- 
pounded and  defended  its  truths,  controlled  its  councils, 
and  directed  its  beneficent  energies.  "  Two  of  the  most 
satisfactory  hours  I  ever  spent  were  far  apart  in  time  and 
place,"  says  Bishop  Mallalieu,  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal 
Church.  "  The  one  was  in  Arkansas,  in  an  uncouth  board 
shed,  where  two  hundred  people  were  crowded  together  to 
listen  to  the  preaching  of  the  Gospel.  Though  the  struc- 
ture was  rude  and  uninviting,  in  fact,  almost  comfortless, 
yet  it  witnessed  the  revelation  of  the  power  of  God 
in  the  outpouring  of  the  Spirit  until  the  place  seemed  as 
really  filled  with  the  divine  presence  as  did  the  upper 
chamber  on  the  day  of  Pentecost.  Believers  were  greatly 
strengthened  and  encouraged,  and  nearly  a  score  of  pen- 
itent men  and  women   bowed  before  God  on  the  rough, 

*  "  Reader  ...  if  you  seek  his  memorial,  look  around." 
t  The  Three  Fountains,  p.  loo. 


30  Ecce  Clerus 

carpetless  floor  to  seek  salvation  in  the  pardon  of  their  sins. 
The  other  hour  of  sacred,  precious  memories  was  spent  in 
York  Minster.  It  was  the  close  of  day— ra  bright  English 
summer  day.  The  setting  sun  poured  a  wealth  of  light  and 
glory  through  the  magnificent  stained-glass  windows  of  that 
wonderful  temple.  It  was  an  hour  full  of  glorious  thoughts. 
The  saintly  men  and  women  that  for  many  centuries  had 
walked  beneath  that  superb  roof,  among  the  shapely  pillars, 
and  had  mingled  their  prayers  and  songs  in  those  dim  aisles, 
seemed  once  again  to  throng  the  place ;  and  as  the  twilight 
gloom  filled  the  sanctuary,  pure,  sweet,  holy  communings 
with  all  the  good  and  with  God  filled  the  heart  and  soul." 
But  perhaps  the  most  significant  feature  of  this  striking 
contrast  is  that  the  original  church — erected  for  the  baptism 
of  Edwin,  King  of  Northumbria,  by  Bishop  Paulinus,  first 
bishop  of  the  province,  in  627 — which  stood  on  the  ground 
now  occupied  by  the  Minster — was  precisely  the  rude 
wooden  shed  of  the  Arkansas  worshipers.  The  present 
Metropolitical  Church  of  the  city  of  York  took  nearly  a 
thousand  years  to  build.  Its  structure  exhibits,  as  it  stands, 
half  a  dozen  distinct  styles  of  architecture.  While  the 
unity  of  design  has  been  remarkably  preserved,  many  hands 
and  many  ages  have  contributed  to  its  completeness.*  It 
therefore  marks  the  consummation  of  a  glorious  history — is, 
in  fact,  the  culmination  of  more  than  a  millennium  of  Chris- 
tian civilization.  Many  years  ago  it  was  the  frequent  privi- 
lege of  the  present  writer,  during  a  prolonged  stay  in  York, 
to  worship  in  the  magnificent  fane  which  to-day  adorns  the 
city  in  which  the  great  Constantine  assumed  the  imperial 
purple,  and  where  for  a  long  time  it  was  fondly  believed  by 
the  citizens  and  by  the  English  people  generally  he  had  his 
nativity,  f  a  city  famous  as  the  headquarters  of  the  distin- 

*  See  Rain's  History  of  York. 

+  When,  in  Panegyrici  Veteres,  it  is  said  that  Constantine  gave  additional  historic 
luster  to  the  old  city — illic  oriendo — the  reference  probably  is,  as  Gibbon  suggests,  to 
his  assumption  within  its  walls  of  the  place  and  power  of  an  Augustus  of  the  empire* 


The  Christian  Ministry  31 

guished  Roman  Imperator  Agricola,  as  the  residence  for  a 
short  time  of  Hadrian  and  Severus,  as  the  last  resting  place 
of  more  than  one  of  the  masters  of  empire,  and  in  later  cen- 
turies as  the  place  of  assembly  for  many  generations  of  the 
mediaeval  British  Parliament,  and  the  home  of  several  of 
England's  greatest  kings  and  their  courts.  His  youthful 
ears  were  often  charmed  there  with  the  most  exquisite 
cathedral  music  to  be  found  in  England  or  elsewhere,  not 
excepting  that  of  St.  Paul's,  of  Westminster,  of  Canterbury, 
and  other  English  cathedral  churches,  to  which  he  has  also 
listened.  He  has  seen  the  stately  processions  of  Church 
magnates  within  its  walls,  as  at  the  great  Church  Congress 
of  1869,  when  Archbishop  Longley,  of  Canterbury,  and  Arch- 
bishop Thomson,  of  the  Northern  Province — preceded  by 
the  civic  dignitaries  and  mace-bearer  and  clad  in  canonical 
attire — and  the  bishops  and  clergy  of  both  provinces,  and 
of  many  colonial  dioceses,  moved  slowly  along  its  historic 
aisles  into  the  choir;  and  he  has  witnessed  the  pompous 
display  of  great  dignitaries  of  the  law  of  the  solemn-faced 
English  type,  with  their  ermine  flowing  yards  behind  them, 
and  grave-mannered  barristers  on  circuit  with  their  silken 
robes  and  wigs  faultlessly  neat  and  prim,  as  at  Assize 
times.  In  the  intellectual,  social,  and  religious  life  of  that 
city  of  churches  and  charities,  of  schools  and  scholarly  men, 
one  sees,  as  one  does  in  many  other  present-day  centers  of 
intellectual  and  religious  activity,  the  high-water  mark  of 
Christian  culture  and  refinement.  Since  those  days  the 
author  has  worshiped  in  congregations  varying  in  size  from 
the  smallest  to  the  largest ;  now  with  less  than  a  dozen  in  a 
village  church,  now  with  several  thousands — as  in  Spurgeon's 
Tabernacle,  London,  and  in  Talmage's  large  church, 
Brooklyn  city,  both  of  them  since  burned  down  ;  now  in 
churches  ornate  and  costly  to  an  extravagant  degree,  and 

and  his  going  forth  thence  to  write  his  splendid  record  as  an  imperator  and  ruler 
inthe  annals  of  Roman  story.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  his  real  nativity  was 
Kissa,  in  Upper  Moesia,  February,  274  A.  D. 


32  Ecce  Clerus 

now  in  churches  puritanically  bare,  and  plain  enough  to 
satisfy  the  scruples  of  George  Fox  himself.  And  every- 
where he  has  been  compelled  to  acknowledge  the  unique 
and  sovereign  power  of  Christianity  and  of  the  Christian 
pulpit  in  the  mighty  strides  of  progress  upward  and  for- 
ward which  are  registered  in  the  displacement  of  the  wooden 
shed  of  Paulinus  by  such  metropolitical  churches  as  those 
of  Canterbury,  and  York,  and  Cologne,  and  St.  John's  Lat- 
eran,  and  the  Roman  St.  Peter's.  And  he  is  constrained  to 
adopt  the  language  of  Cardinal  Newman  as  more  true  of 
the  typical  Christian  minister  in  the  wide  field  of  history, 
and  as  a  master  craftsman  employed  on  the  stately  fabric  of 
the  universal  City  of  God,  than  of  the  occupant  of  the  chair 
of  St.  Peter,  to  whom  the  cardinal  exclusively  applied  them: 
"  He  is  no  recluse,  no  solitary  student,  no  dreamer  about  the 
past,  no  doter  upon  the  dead  and  gone,  no  projector  of  the 
visionary.  He  for  eighteen  hundred  years  has  lived  in  the 
world ;  he  has  seen  all  fortunes,  he  has  encountered  all  ad- 
versaries, he  has  shaped  himself  for  all  emergencies.  .  .  . 
From  the  first  he  has  looked  through  the  wide  world  of 
which  he  has  the  burden;  and,  according  to  the  need  of  the 
day  and  the  inspirations  of  his  Lord,  he  has  set  himself 
now  to  one  thing,  now  to  another;  but  to  all  in  season  and 
to  nothing  in  vain.  He  came  first  upon  an  age  of  refine- 
ment and  luxury  like  our  own,  and  in  spite  of  the  persecutor 
— fertile  in  the  resources  of  his  cruelty — he  soon  gathered, 
out  of  all  classes  of  society,  the  slave,  the  soldier,  the  high- 
born lady  and  the  sophist,  materials  enough  to  form  a  people 
to  his  Master's  honor.  The  savage  hordes  came  down  in 
torrents  from  the  north,  and  [he]  went  out  to  meet  them 
and  by  his  very  eye  he  sobered  them  and  backed  them  in 
their  full  career.  They  turned  aside  and  flooded  the  whole 
earth,  but  only  to  be  more  surely  civilized  by  him  and  to 
be  made  ten  times  more  his  children  even  than  the  older 
populations  which  they  had  overwhelmed.     Lawless  kings 


The  Christian  Ministry  33 

arose,  sagacious  as  the  Roman,  passionate  as  the  Hun,  yet 
in  him  they  found  their  match  and  were  shattered,  and  he 
lived  on.  The  gates  of  the  earth  were  opened  to  the  east 
and  the  west,  and  men  poured  out  to  take  possession,  but  he 
went  with  them  as  a  missionary  to  China,  to  India,  to  Mex- 
ico, to  Africa,  to  the  great  RepubHc  of  North  America,  and 
the  islands  of  the  South  Pacific  Ocean — carried  along  by 
zeal  and  charity  as  far  as  those  children  of  men  were  led  by 
enterprise,  covetousness,  or  ambition.  .  .  .  Has  he  failed  to 
meet  and  to  minister  to  the  deepest  and  most  essential 
needs  of  the  human  soul  up  to  this  hour.?  What  gray  hairs 
are  on  the  head  of  Judah,  whose  youth  is  renewed  like  the 
eagle's,  whose  feet  are  like  the  feet  of  harts,  and  under- 
neath the  Everlasting  Arms.?"* 

*  Newman's  Idea  of  a  University  Defined  and  Illustrated,  pp.  13,  14.     The  au- 
thor has  taken  the  liberty  to  adapt  the  latter  part  of  this  beautiful  passage. 


34  Ecce  Clerus 


CHAPTER  II 
Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry 

The  Heavenly  City,  in  its  wanderings  on  earth,  summons  its  citizens  from 
all  nations,  .  .  ,  being  itself  indifferent  to  whatever  differences  there  may  be 
in  the  customs,  laws,  and  institutions  by  which  earthly  peace  is  sought  or 
preserved,  not  rescinding  or  destroying  any  of  them,  but  rather  keeping  and 
following  after  them  as  different  means  adopted  by  different  races  for  obtain- 
ing the  one  common  end  of  eternal  peace,  provided  only  they  are  no  obstacle 
to  the  religion  by  which  men  are  taught  the  worship  of  the  one  supreme  and 
true  God. — St.  Augustine,  "  De  Civitate  Dei,"  xix,  17. 

Be  sure  that  whenever  the  religion  of  Christ  appears  small  or  forbidding,  or 
narrow,  or  inhuman,  you  are  not  dealing  with  the  whole — which  is  a  matchless 
moral  symmetry  ;  nor  even  with  an  arch  or  column — for  every  detail  is  perfect 
— but  with  some  cold  stone  removed  from  its  place  and  suggesting  nothing  of 
the  glorious  structure  from  which  it  came. — Henry  Drummond. 

Enough — and  too  much — of  the  sect  and  the  name ; 
What  matters  our  label,  so  truth  be  our  aim  ? 
The  creed  may  be  strange,  but  the  life  may  be  true  ; 
And  hearts  beat  the  same  under  drab  coats  or  blue. 

—  Whittier, 
J,  Rise  of  Type, 

The  Renaissance  liberated  thought  from  the  hierarchal 
tutelage  of  centuries,  and  Protestanism,  having  assisted  in 
the  breaking  of  the  spell,  sought  to  consecrate  the  new 
freedom  and  enlist  its  potent  and  restless  energies  in  the 
interests  of  religion  and  morality.  The  result  of  the  intel- 
lectual emancipation  of  Europe,  however,  was  precisely 
what  a  deeper  insight  into  human  nature  would  have  taught 
its  promoters  to  anticipate,  namely,  the  assertion  of  an 
unrestricted  right  of  private  judgment  in  religion,  the  rise 
and  growth  of  sectionalism,  and  the  production,  within  the 
narrow  domain  of  each  religious  coterie,  of  teachers  and  lead- 
ers with  a  peculiar  mental  squint  and  a  marked  denomi- 
national accent.  From  the  period  of  the  Reformation 
downward  Protestant  unity  has  been  continually  breaking  up 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  35 

and  crumbling  into  fragments,  and  there  has  been  a  steady 
multipHcation  of  ecclesiastical  shibboleths  side  by  side  with 
a  growing  sense,  in  later  times,  on  the  part  of  a  thoughtful 
few,  in  all  communions  of  the  evils  of  a  rigid,  oversensitive, 
and  arrogant  sectarianism.  The  condition  of  the  Christian 
world  at  the  present  moment,  with  its  bewildering  diversity 
of  sects,  creeds,  customs,  and  forms  of  ecclesiastical  organi- 
zation and  government,  is  making  it  difficult  even  for  men 
of  the  thoroughest  culture  and  widest  catholicity  of  spirit 
not  to  "  cramp  their  hearts  "  nor  "  take  half  views  of  men 
and  things;  "  and  a  full-orbed  spiritual  manhood,  not  to 
speak  of  a  broad-sympathied  Christian  cosmopolitanism,  is 
almost  entirely  out  of  the  question.  Every  denomination 
has  its  own  ideal  ministry,  its  own  standard  of  clerical  char- 
acter and  qualification — usually  a  collection  of  social, 
moral,  and  intellectual  attributes  and  religious  prejudices 
combined,  in  varying  proportions,  according  to  an  unwrit- 
ten prescription,  and  answering  more  or  less  perfectly  to 
the  indefinable  traditional  pattern  recognized  and  required 
within  the  body.* 

2.  Its  Forms  Pronounced. 

This  conformity  to  type,  though  possibly  a  necessity  in 
the  present  condition  of  things,  and  probably  not  an  un- 
mixed evil,  can  yet  hardly  be  regarded  with  complete  satis- 
faction in  view  of  its  obvious  tendency  to  defeat  the  prime 
object  of  the  Christian  religion,  which  is  avowedly  to  con- 
fer on  the  world,  in  and  through  its  varied  ministry,  the 

*  An  able  and  scholarly  man,  who  has  had  much  to  do  for  many  years  with  the 
training  of  young  ministers  in  a  theological  school  of  one  of  the  largest  and  most  influ- 
ential denominations  in  England,  thus  writes;  "  The  Methodist  ministry  has  developed 
a  type  of  its  own  remarkable  for  two  things.  First,  for  the  persistence  with  which  it 
has  dwelt  on  the  central  truths  of  saving  religion ;  and,  secondly,  for  the  fervor  it  has 
thrown  into  the  preaching  of  those  truths.  It  should  be  frankly  conceded  that  in  one 
sense  its  range  of  topics  has  been  comparatively  narrow.  Those  topics,  indeed,  have 
included  the  central  verities  of  redemption,  and  have  implied  a  great  deal  more.  A 
similar  limitation  applies  to  other  Churches  and  ministries.  Human  knowledge  can 
only  cover  one  side  of  God's  truth.  .  .  .The  Methodist  ministry  has  made  certain 
parts  of  the  Gospel  its  own.  .  .  .We  are  extyemely  anxious  that  Methodism  should 
be  true  to  the  type  of  preaching  which  is  its  own  creation.  It  is  a  type  worth  pre- 
W.Tra\%P— Professor  J.  S.  Banks,  in  Methodist  Times,  August  8,  1895. 


36  Ecce  Clems 

noblest,  the  most  evenly-balanced,  and  most  perfect  type  of 
manhood.  "  He  gave  some  to  be  apostles ;  and  some, 
prophets;  and  some,  evangelists;  and  some,  pastors  and 
teachers ;  for  the  perfecting  of  the  saints,  unto  the  work  of 
ministering,  unto  the  building  up  of  the  body  of  Christ :  till 
we  all  attain  unto  the  unity  of  the  faith,  and  of  the  knowl- 
edge of  the  Son  of  God,  unto  a  full-grown  man  {elg  dvdga 
reXecov),  unto  the  measure  of  the  stature  of  the  fullness  of 
Christ"  (Eph.  iv,  11-13). 

Peculiarities  of  doctrinal  belief,  or  of  Church  polity  and 
usage,  though  formerly  held  with  more  zeal  and  tenacity 
than  at  present,  when,  indeed,  there  is  a  growing  tendency 
to  regard  them  as  a  vogue  of  the  past,  have  left  their  im- 
press deep  and  broad  on  most  present-day  Churches,  giving 
to  the  whole  expression  of  their  religious  life  that  distinctive 
tone  and  color  which  a  stranger  instantly  detects.  Even 
the  culture  which  has  been  defined  as  "  the  complete  spirit- 
ual development  of  the  individual,"  and  again,  as  "  the 
compensation  of  bias,"  does  not  enable  the  representatives 
of  sectional  Christianity  to  entirely  escape  the  denomina- 
tional lisp  or  conceal  the  denominational  livery.  Men  who 
stand  among  their  brethren  like  Saul  among  the  men  of 
Benjamin,  head  and  shoulders  above  them  all,  get  to  some 
extent  warped  and  twisted  in  their  intellectual  growth  and 
moral  sympathies  by  the  limits,  restrictions,  and  omissions 
of  a  creed  and  a  polity  which  are  necessarily  narrower  and 
shallower  than  the  whole  Christian  teaching  and  discipline 
— the  precious  depositum  of  Him  who  said,  "  The  words  that 
I  spake  unto  you  are  spirit  and  are  life ; "  and,  "  Ye  shall 
know  the  truth,  and  the  truth  shall  make  you  free."  "  You 
congratulate  me  upon  being  the  Vicar  of  Leeds,"  wrote 
Dr.  Hook,  the  learned  author  of  The  Lives  of  the  Arch- 
bishops of  Canterbury,  to  a  friend,  soon  after  entering  on 
his  labors  in  a  field  in  which  he  achieved  a  signal  suc- 
cess; "but  I  am  only  vicar  in  name;  the  real  vicar  is  a 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  37 

Methodist  preacher  called  John  Rattenbury  ;  I  am  come  to 
alter  that."  * 

This  evil  result  was  inevitable.  For  the  use  of  creed, 
often  a  necessity  and  a  help  at  the  outstart  of  new  religious 
movements,  has  uniformly  degenerated  into  a  mischievous 
restraint  upon  intellectual  and  spiritual  freedom.  While 
the  construction,  spirit,  and  purpose  of  almost  every  doc- 
trinal symbol  from  the  time  of  the  Council  of  Nicsea  down- 
ward have  been  mainly  negative,  and  have  been  intended 
more  to  safeguard  subscribers  against  the  invasion  of  error 
than  to  give  theological  information,  it  has  been  held  and 
employed  in  the  most  positive  manner,  as  if  it  contained 
the  most  complete  and  most  authoritative  declaration  of  all 
that  is  to  be  believed,  f  It  has  been  forgotten  that  all  dog- 
matic postulates  must  necessarily  be  inadequate  expressions 
of  Christian  faith  in  consequence  of  their  polemical  and 
negative  character.  For  example,  Trinitarianism,  as  often 
formulated,  on  the  one  side,  and  Unitarianism,  as  mostly 
held,  on  the  other,  are  half  truths  standing  over  against 
each  other  in  unreconciled  antithesis. J  The  unique  mys- 
tery of  revealed  religion  lies  between  these  negatives  with- 
out positive  solution,  perhaps  incapable  of  it  in  human 
terms.  §  But  this  negative  character  of  the  creed  has  been 
entirely  lost  sight  of,  with  the  result  of  making  the  life  and 
faith,  both  of  the  ministry  and  membership  of  denomina- 
tional Churches,  narrow,  fettered,  fearful  of  fresh  truths,  and 

*  John  Rattenbury  was  a  regular  circuit  minister  of  the  Wesleyan  denomination  in 
Leeds,  England.  At  the  time  of  Dr.  Hook's  advent  he  was  very  popular  in  that  large 
manufacturing  town  as  a  preacher  and  revivalist. 

t  Vide  Rev.  Charles  Gore's,  Incarnation  of  the  Son  of  God,  p.  177. 

X  "  Because  I  believe  in  the  Father,  the  Son,  the  Holy  Spirit — Three  in  One,  One  in 
Three — I  claim  to  be  a  Unitarian.  Unity  is  harmonized  and  cooperative  complexity. 
Unity  is  not  loneliness.  They  who  deny  the  Deity  of  the  Saviour  are  not  Unitarians, 
they  are  Solitarians.  They  know  not  the  music,  the  peace,  the  rapture  of  unity." — 
Dr.  Joseph  Parker,  Sermon  before  the  Free  Church  Congress,  Nottingham,  England, 
1895- 

§  I  Tim.  iii,  16.  The  reading  of  8f  in  place  of  Ge(5f,  adopted  by  Lachman,  Tischen- 
dorf,  Tregelles,  and  the  Revisers,  in  no  way  diminishes  the  importance  of  the  apos- 
tolic statement,  as  to  the  mystery  {ttq  fivaT7)piav\  which  is  "  confessedly  great " 
{dfiokcyyovfihuq  fieya). 


38  Ecce  Clems 

even  of  old  truths  in  new  aspects ;  incapable  of  compre- 
hending and  afraid  to  claim  its  whole  glorious  inheritance 
in  Christ.  It  has  been  forgotten  that  "  Christianity  is  not  a 
logical  or  mathematical  problem,  and  cannot  be  reduced  to 
the  limitations  of  a  human  system.  It  is  above  any  partic- 
ular system,  and  comprehends  the  truths  of  all  systems.  It 
is  above  logic,  yet  not  illogical ;  as  revelation  is  above  rea- 
son, yet  not  against  reason." 

Before  the  rise  of  the  great  philanthropies  and  missionary 
agencies  of  modern  Christendom,  and  especially  of  the  re- 
cent widespread  interest  in  social  and  industrial  questions, 
affecting  the  well-being  of  millions  of  the  people,  the  reli- 
gious world  presented  the  aspect  of  a  series  of  water-tight 
compartments,  and  the  piety  of  the  individual  Christian  was 
estimated  according  to  the  fidelity  and  exclusiveness  with 
which  he  confined  himself  and  his  active  sympathy,  be- 
neficence, and  prayers  to  his  own  tank.  The  Rev.  John 
Owen,  one  of  the  founders  of  the  British  and  Foreign  Bible 
Society,  and  one  of  its  first  secretaries,  says,  "  Christians 
had  been  taught  to  regard  each  other  with  a  kind  of  pious 
estrangement,  or  rather  with  consecrated  hostility."  And  he 
remarks  that  the  scene  in  the  convention  "  which  formed 
the  society  seemed  strange  "  to  him,  and  "  indicated  the 
dawn  of  a  new  era  in  Christendom."*  "I  can  introduce 
you  as  a  gentleman,  but  not  as  a  minister,"  said  a  High 
Anglican  clergyman  to  his  Nonconformist  brother  of  the 
cloth  in  a  large  social  gathering  in  London.  "  And  I  can 
speak  of  you  as  a  minister,  but  not  as  a  gentleman,"  retorted 
the  dissenter.  The  one  groundless  "  dogma  of  the  Apos- 
tolic Succession,"  says  Hugh  Price  Hughes,  "has  done 
more  to  produce  division,  discord,  bitterness,  and  misery 
than  any  other  vain  imagination  of  the  mind  of  man.  At 
this  moment,  in  spite  of  all  the  humanizing  influences  of 

*  Address  of  Dr.  A.  S.  Hunt,  Corresponding  Secretary  American  Bible  Society, 
before  World's  Congress  of  Missions,  at  Chicago,  September  29,  1893. 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  39 

Christianity  and  civilization,  it  is  carrying  strife  and  wretch- 
edness into  thousands  of  Engh'sh  homes." 

It  is  a  curious  illustration  of  the  way  in  which  "  wheat 
and  tares  grow  together  until  the  harvest "  that  the  very  age 
which  voices  its  catholic  sentiment  in  the  words  of  Oliver 
Wendell  Holmes:  "  I  never  saw  a  church  door  so  narrow 
I  couldn't  go  in  through  it,  nor  one  so  wide  that  all  the 
Creator's  goodness  and  glory  could  enter  it  "  * — an  age 
which  can  smile  in  patronizing  and  commiserating  mood  at 
the  zealous  orthodoxy  of  St.  John,  leaving  the  public  baths 
at  Ephesus  because  Cerinthus  was  there,  or  the  childish 
illiberality  of  Polycarp,  repelling  Marcion  in  the  streets  of 
Rome  as  *'  the  firstborn  of  Satan  " — should  be  obliged  to 
recognize  the  same  untamed  and  inhospitable  disposition 
in  a  favorite  poet  whom  it  regards  as  registering  the  high- 
water  mark  of  cultured  sainthood,  the  happiest  blending  of 
Christian  piety  and  classic  lore  in  our  time.  The  amiable 
and  saintly  author  of  the  Christian  Year  did  not  hesitate 
to  brand  his  dissenting  fellow-Christians  as  heretics.  His 
distribution  of  mankind  religiously  is  as  follows:  "Christians 
properly  so-called — that  is,  Catholics;  Jews,  Mohammedans, 
and  heretics;  heathens  and  unbelievers."  In  rural  Eng- 
land, where  the  Established  Church  assumes  the  right  to 
dominate,  a  clergj^man  has  been  heard  to  say  publicly, 
"  Dissenters'  prayers  may  reach  the  throne  of  God  only  to 
be  hurled  back  as  infamous  blasphemy; "  while  another 
has  been  known  to  truculently  claim  control  of  both  the 
amenities  of  earth  and  the  mercies  of  heaven,  in  the  follow- 
ing language,  spoken  to  a  poor  woman:  "  If  you  allow  these 
dissenters  to  pray  with  your  husband,  I  will  not  administer 
the  sacrament  to  you,  and  that  will  mean  damnation."  As 
a  specimen  of  the  uncompromising  animus  and  arrogant  at- 
titude of  high  ecclesiasticism  toward  less  pretentious  forms 
of  piety  and  polity  the  following,  taken  from  Gace's  Cate- 

*  Over  the  Ttacnps. 


40  Ecce  Clerus 

chism,  circulated  by  thousands  in  rural  and  municipal  Eng- 
land, may  fairly  challenge  comparison  with  anything  to  be 
found  in  the  darkest  ages  of  Christian  history : 

'*  We  have  amongst  us  various  sects  and  denominations 
who  go  by  the  general  name  of  dissenters.  In  what  light 
are  we  to  regard  them  ?"     "As  heretics." 

"Is,  then,  their  worship  a  laudable  service.?"  "No;  be- 
cause they  worship  God  according  to  their  own  evil  and 
corrupt  imaginations  and  not  according  to  his  revealed 
will ;  and  therefore  their  worship  is  idolatrous." 

Christianity,  however,  being  characteristically  and  essen- 
tially a  religion  of  peace  and  good  will,  can  never  hope, 
even  in  its  most  degenerate  forms,  to  excel  in  malediction ; 
and  the  rarest  examples  of  recorded  anathema  are  not 
Christian,  but  Jewish  and  Mohammedan,  When  Renan 
unveiled  the  statue  of  Spinoza  at  The  Hague,  about  twenty 
years  ago,  he  claimed  for  that  philosopher  the  grandest  of 
all  possible  distinctions.  "  From  this  point,"  he  said,  al- 
luding to  the  later  home  of  Spinoza,  on  the  Pavilioen 
Gracht,  "  God  was  the  nearest  seen."  His  Hebrew  co- 
religionists, however,  took  a  very  different  view  of  the  deep 
and  daring  speculations  of  the  author  of  the  Ethics.  "  By 
the  sentence  of  the  angels,  by  the  decree  of  the  saints,"  ran 
the  fierce  and  blistering  strain  of  their  imprecation,  "  we 
anathematize,  cut  off,  curse,  and  execrate  Baruch  Spinoza, 
in  the  presence  of  these  sacred  books  with  the  six  hundred 
and  thirteen  precepts  written  therein,  with  the  anathema 
wherewith  Joshua  anathematized  Jericho ;  with  the  cursing 
wherewith  Elisha  cursed  the  children,  and  with  all  the  curs- 
ings which  are  written  in  the  Book  of  the  Law.  Cursed  be 
he  by  day  and  cursed  by  night ;  cursed  when  he  lieth  down 
and  cursed  when  he  riseth  up ;  cursed  when  he  goeth  out 
and  cursed  when  he  cometh  in  ;  the  Lord  pardon  him 
never  ;  the  wrath  and  fury  of  the  Lord  burn  upon  this  man, 
and  bring  upon  him  all  the  curses  which  are  written  in  the 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  41 

Book  of  the  Law,  The  Lord  blot  out  his  name  under 
heaven.  The  Lord  set  him  apart  for  destruction  from  all 
the  tribes  of  Israel,  with  curses  of  the  firmament  which  are 
written  in  the  Book  of  the  Law.  .  .  .  There  shall  no  man 
speak  to  him,  no  man  write  to  him,  no  man  show  him  any 
kindness,  no  man  stay  under  the  same  roof  with  him,  no 
man  come  nigh  him." 

"  With  these  amenities,  the  current  compliments  of  theo- 
logical parting,"  remarks  Matthew  Arnold,  "  the  Jews  of  the 
Portuguese  Synagogue  at  Amsterdam  took,  in  1656,  .  .  . 
their  leave  of  their  erring  brother,  Baruch,  or  Benedict, 
Spinoza,  They  remained  children  of  Israel,  and  he  became 
a  child  of  modern  Europe."  * 

**  From  Moses  to  Moses  [that  is,  Maimonides]  no  one  has 
risen  like  Moses,"  wrote  the  liberal-minded  admirers  of  the 
great  Jewish  scholar  and  philosopher  on  his  tombstone.  "Here 
lies  Moses,  the  anathematized  heretic,"  wrote  his  enemies. 

Denominationalism  doubtless  has  some  advantages,  but 
when  all  the  good  to  which  it  can  fairly  lay  claim  is  weighed 
against  the  evils  for  which  it  is  directly  responsible  the  lat- 
ter so  largely  preponderates  that  few  will  hesitate  to  nod 
assent  to  the  words  of  Bunyan,  with  which  he  answered  the 
bigots  of  his  day  and  denomination — words  which  the  pres- 
ent writer  heard  Dean  Stanley,  in  a  lecture  on  "  The  Names 
of  the  Early  Christians,"  indorse  with  that  impressive  so- 
lemnity of  tone  and  manner  which  is  only  born  of  deep  con- 
viction :  "  And  since  you  would  know  by  what  name  I  would 
be  distinguished  from  others,  I  tell  you  I  would  be,  and  hope 
I  am,  a  Christian;  and  choose,  if  God  should  count  me 
worthy,  to  be  called  a  Christian,  a  believer,  or  other  such 
name  which  is  approved  by  the  Holy  Ghost,  And  as  for 
those  factious  titles  of  Anabaptists,  Independents,  Presby- 
terians, or  the  like,  I  conclude  that  they  came  neither  from 
Jerusalem  nor  Antioch,  but  rather  from  hell  and  Babylon ; 

•  Arnold's  Essays  in  Criticism.     First  series.     Boston,  1865,  p.  237. 


42  Ecce  Clerus 

for  they  naturally  tend  to  divisions.  'You  may  know  them 
by  their  fruits.'  "  *  "  It  is  quite  a  mistake,"  says  Mr.  C.  F. 
Aked,  the  popular  Baptist  minister  of  Liverpool,  "  to  sup- 
pose that  we  are  Baptists  because  we  baptize.  We  baptize 
because  we  are  Baptists.  Our  position  never  grew  out  of 
our  views  and  practices  of  baptism.  Our  views  and  prac- 
tices grew  out  of  our  position  as  Baptists."  f 

3.  Its  Rule^  Rigid  and  Absolute* 

The  narrowing  and  withering  spirit  of  creed  and  ecclesi- 
astical particularism  has  held  its  own,  in  some  quarters, 
from  Bunyan's  day  till  now,  and  at  this  hour  "  the  fruitful 
bough  by  a  well,"  whose  branches  happen  to  "  run  over  " 
the  denominational  **  wall,"  has  no  more  opportunity  for 
quiet  growth  and  expansion  than  the  favorite  son  of  Jacob, 
who  thousands  of  years  ago  excited  the  envy  and  anger  of 
"  the  archers "  that  "  sorely  grieved  him  and  shot  at  him 
and  hated  him."  There  is  something  infinitely  pathetic  in 
the  plaint  of  a  gifted  thinker  and  devoted  Congregational 
pastor  in  London,  well  known,  both  as  an  author  and 
preacher,  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic,  when  he  says : 

"  The  deepest  trouble  of  the  true  preacher's  soul  is  this, 
that  men  and  life  conspire  to  make  it  easy  for  him  to  do  his 
worst,  and  difficult,  or  well-nigh  impossible,  for  him  to  do 
his  best.  The  solid  phalanx  of  good,  hard-working,  un- 
thinking people  that  fill  the  ranks  of  most  Christian  and 
unchristian  societies  are  blissfully  tolerant  of  their  minis- 
ter as  long  as  he  will  not  think.  Let  him  work  on  the  lines 
of  the  accepted  creed  ;  let  him  engage  in  ingenious  de- 
fenses of  its  several  articles  ;  let  him  assume  a  foundation 
and  build  what  he  pleases  thereon,  and  they  are  well  con- 
tent. That  is  what  they  mean  by  truth,  or  rather,  as  they 
prefer  to  call  it,  with  a  fine  but  very  necessary  distinction, 

_  *  Peaceable  Principles  and  True.    Bunyan's  Works,  Hansard  KnoUy's  Society  edi- 
tion, p.  648. 
t  Sermon  on  the  Place  of  Baptists  in  the  Making  of  England. 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  43 

the  truth.  But  suppose,  just  because  his  life  is  consecrated 
to  study  and  thought  and  prayer,  and  he  is  committed  to 
the  venture  of  finding  what  really  is  true,  he  is  driven,  as 
true  men  have  in  all  ages  been  driven,  to  distinguish  be- 
tween those  parts  of  the  foundation  which  are  solid  rock, 
and  other  parts  which  are  the  idle  concrete  of  tradition, 
what  will  be  his  fate  ?  The  solid  phalanx  closes  against 
him,  this  uncomfortable  disturber  of  the  accepted  positions. 
Quieta  non  movere  is  the  watchword.  Suspicion,  misrepre- 
sentation, flouts,  and  scorns  are  his  portion.  The  young 
are  solemnly  warned  to  keep  away  from  so  dangerous  an 
influence.  Assailed  by  foes  whom  he  cannot  possibly  dis- 
tinguish or  discover,  he  may  find  his  work  arrested  and  his 
life  made  a  burden.  Pity  does  not  dwell  in  the  fiery  heart 
of  orthodoxy.  Torquemada  is  simply  the  blazing  sixteenth- 
century  representative  of  an  eternal  phenomenon.  Should 
you  turn  round  seriously  to  inquire  how  great  the  deviation 
of  this  proscribed  heretic  is  from  the  accepted  faith,  you 
might  be  puzzled  to  find  any  deviation  at  all.  Should  you 
honestly  inquire  whether  the  deviation,  such  as  it  is,  is,  after 
all,  right,  you  might  be  forced  to  confess  that  it  is — truth 
clear,  self-evident,  irrefragable.  But  your  strength  is  that 
you  do  not  inquire.  Your  power  over  your  victim  is  that  he 
feels  bound  to  inquire ;  to  be  candid ;  not  to  believe  a  lie. 
You  are  conscious  of  no  such  necessity.  Your  function  is  to 
defend  your  traditional  creed  at  all  costs.  Your  victory  is 
won  when  foes,  good  and  bad,  are  driven  outside  the  lines."* 
So  absolute  is  the  rule  of  the  type  and  the  domination  of 
the  "  standards  "  that  when  a  minister  develops  original 
features  of  character — assumes  the  role  of  a  fearless  re- 
former of  obvious  abuses,  or  becomes  an  earnest  and  con- 
scientious investigator  and  student,  or  presents  and  em- 
phasizes some  new  or  neglected  phase  of  an  old  truth,  or 
brushes  aside  some  superannuated  and  useless  ecclesiastical 

*  Rev.  R.  F.  Horton,  in  Methodist  Times  for  February,  1894. 


44  Ecce  Clerus 

tradition,  custom,  or  usage — his  daring  individualism  and 
departure  from  the  accepted  type  is  usually  punished,  either 
with  the  slow  torture  of  social  martyrdom,  like  Frederic  W. 
Robertson,  of  Brighton,  or  with  the  much  milder  penalty  of 
expulsion  from  the  clan,  as  in  the  case  of  Spinoza  and  of 
Dr.  William  Robertson  Smith,  late  Adams  Professor  of  Arabic 
in  the  University  of  Cambridge,  who,  in  1881,  after  years  of 
controversy  in  the  press  and  in  the  courts  of  the  Church, 
was  finally  removed,  without  trial,  from  his  chair  as  Profess- 
or of  Hebrew  and  Old  Testament  Exegesis  in  the  Free 
Church  College  of  Aberdeen,  It  is  this  kind  of  fate  which 
gives  such  profound  pathos  to  the  words  of  Arminius  in  his 
letter  to  Uitenbogaert  at  the  moment  when  Francis  Gomar 
and  his  following  were  hounding  the  great  Leyden  theolo- 
gian to  death  ;  showing  how  much  deeper  and  nobler  is  the 
holy  passion  for  truth  than  the  persecutor's  melodramatic 
frenzy  for  orthodoxy.  "  Truth,  even  theological  truth,"  he 
says,  "  has  been  sunk  in  a  deep  well,  whence  it  cannot  be 
drawn  without  much  effort."  "  I  should  be  foolish  were  I  to 
concede  to  anyone  so  much  of  right  in  me  as  that  he  should 
be  able  to  disturb  me  as  often  as  he  pleased.  Be  this  my 
brazen  wall — a  conscience  void  of  offense.  Forward  let  me 
still  go  in  search  after  truth,  and  therein  let  me  die  with  the 
good  God  on  my  side,  even  if  I  must  needs  incur  the  hatred 
and  ill-will  of  the  whole  world," 

4,  Application  of  the  Screw. 

The  vain  effort  after  conformity  to  a  false  and  impossible 
human  ideal  has  led  not  only  to  forgetfulness  of  the  vital 
law  of  "  diversity  of  operations  by  the  selfsame  spirit,"  by 
which  alone  the  divine  ideal  can  ever  become  a  certified 
reality,  but  with  a  not  unusual  fatefulness  it  has  brought 
about,  almost  uniformly,  the  substitution  of  a  greater  error 
for  a  less,  namely,  the  sacrifice  of  love  and  pity — which  are 
the  life  and  essence  of  religion — in  the  supposed  interests  of 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  45 

faith,  which  is  only  its  partial  and  precarious  intellectual 
expression.  The  vaunted  motto  of  Catholic  Christianity, 
semper  eadem,  has  been  powerless  to  arrest  the  deep  currents 
of  earnest  thought  and  conviction  which  bear  men's  minds 
forward  in  every  age,  but  it  has  often  led  to  an  indolent 
contentedness  with  truth's  impalpable  shadow  in  place  of 
its  enduring  substance,  and  has  disfigured  the  page  of  the 
Church's  history  with  its  darkest  stain,  the  unreasoning  and 
ruthless  despotism  of  authority.  Nothing  more  strikingly 
illustrates  the  utter  incapability  of  even  the  wisest  and  best 
of  men  to  understand  and  appreciate  the  manifold  opera- 
tions of  the  All-knowing  Spirit  of  God  in  the  infinitely 
diversified  thought  and  life  of  men,  and  their  consequent 
unfitness  to  exercise  authority  in  a  sphere  where  they  are 
so  hopelessly  at  sea,  than  the  attitude  of  the  Roman  Church 
toward  various  religious  movements,  within  and  outside  her 
pale,  through  which  Providence  has  conferred  unmeasured 
blessing  on  millions  of  the  race.  The  faintest  ripple  on  her 
broad  and  stagnant  waters  has  been  regarded  as  the  signal 
for  alarm,  and  the  Malchus  of  the  Catholic  household  only 
escapes  the  swift  and  sure  stroke  of  Peter's  sword  by  yield- 
ing an  unmurmuring  submission  and  obedience  to  the  Apos- 
tolic Chair.  Dominic  is  encouraged  because  he  is  a  faithful 
and  affectionate  son  of  his  mother — the  Church — and  is 
willing  to  blend  a  watchful  regard  for  the  prerogatives  of 
authority  with  his  mission  of  salvation  and  enlightenment ;  * 
but  the  German  monk,  bent  on  bringing  about  the  resurrec- 
tion of  a  long-buried  truth,  and  the  release  of  the  soul  of 
religion  from  a  worse  than  Babylonian  captivity,  is  an  object, 
first,  of  amused  curiosity,  then  of  suspicion  and  anxiety,  then 
of  alarm,  then  of  baffled  intrigue  and  violence.  Loyola  may 
preach  chastity  and  poverty,  however  alien  these  venerable 

*  When  Pope  Honorius  III  confirmed  the  statutes  and  established  the  Order  of  St. 
Dominic  he  gave  it,  as  its  symbol,  a  dog  with  a  torch  in  his  mouth— the  dog  to  watch 
and  the  torch  to  illumine  the  Church. 


46  Ecce  Clerus 

and  rare  attributes  may  be  from  the  habitual  disposition  and 
practice  of  the  princes  of  the  Church,  if  only  he  will  enforce 
along  with  them  the  more  sovereign  and  more  serviceable 
virtue  of  obedience.  Purity  and  self-denial,  though  of  the 
very  essence  of  godliness,  are  by  no  means  indispensable  to 
the  stability  of  authority.  Obedience,  however,  is  its  corner 
stone — the  rock  on  which  the  whole  fabric  of  ecclesiastical 
power  must  ever  rest,  and  against  which  the  gates  of  hell 
shall  not  prevail.  Nor  can  the  liberty  allowed  to  Loyola 
and  Lainez — the  apostles  of  obedience — be  accorded  to  the 
deep-souled  St.  Cyran  and  his  studious  and  scholarly  friend 
Jansenius,  fathers  of  worthy  spiritual  children — teachers  of 
loftiest  and  most  luminous  souls  like  Arnauld,  Pascal, 
Nicole,  Le  Maitre,  De  Saci,  and  M^re  Angelique  and  her 
sister  Agnes.  It  was  only  from  within  the  gloomy  shadows 
of  his  prison  at  Vincennes,  to  which  his  early  friend  and 
quondam  flatterer.  Cardinal  Richelieu,*  had  consigned  him, 
that  the  Abbot  of  St.  Cyran  was  permitted  to  speak  to  the 
hearts  that  loved  and  trusted  him,  and  that  preferred  his 
solemn  admonitions  to  the  lighter  and  more  dulcet  strains 
of  the  hirelings  of  the  fold.  It  was  from  his  dismal  cell  in 
the  Bastile  that  De  Saci  sent  the  clear  and  kindly  ray  of 
the  word  of  the  **  Eternal  "  into  thousands  of  French  homes. 
It  was  in  the  face  of  the  frown  of  papal  authority  that  the 
Augustinus  of  Jansenius  was  given  to  the  world  and  became 
"  the  signal  of  a  contest  which  for  nearly  seventy  years  agi- 
tated the  Sorbonne  and  Versailles,  fired  the  enthusiasm  of 
the  ladies  and  the  divines  of  France,  and  gave  to  her  his- 
torians and  her  wits  a  theme,  used  with  fatal  success,  to 
swell  the  tide  of  hatred  and  of  ridicule — which  has  finally 
swept  away  the  temporal  greatness,  and  which  silenced,  for  a 
while,  the  spiritual  ministrations  of  the  Gallican  Church."  f 

*  "  '  Gentlemen,  I  introduce  to  you  the  most  learned  man  in  Europe,'  was  the  flat- 
tering phrase  by  which  Cardinal  Richelieu  made  known  the  friend  of  his  youth  to  the 
courtiers  who   thronged   his  levee." — Stephen,  Critical  and  Miscelianeous  Essays, 

p.  lOO. 

t  Stephen,  Critical  and  Miscellaneous  Essays,  p.  loz, 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  47 

But  if  Rome  is  hard  upon  the  irrepressible  inquiries  and 
aspirations  of  her  own  children,  how  strangely  considerate 
and  tender  she  can  be  toward  those  who,  weary  of  the  perils 
and  responsibilities  of  intellectual  freedom,  seek  rest  from 
their  wanderings  and  surer  steps  for  their  feet  by  returning 
to  her  fold !  Who  can  fail  to  be  struck  with  the  kindly  tone 
and  consummate  policy  of  Cardinal  Wiseman's  letter  on 
"  Catholic  Unity,"  published  when  the  famous  Oxford  con- 
troversy was  at  its  height  ?  *'  Are  we,"  he  asks,  "  who  sit  in 
the  full  light,  to  see  our  friends  feeling  their  way  toward  us 
through  the  gloom  that  surrounds  them,  and  faltering  for 
want  of  an  outstretched  hand,  or  turning  astray  for  want  of 
a  directing  voice,  and  to  sit  on,  and  keep  silent,  amusing 
ourselves  at  their  painful  efforts,  or  perhaps  allow  them  to 
hear,  from  time  to  time,  only  the  suppressed  laugh  of  one 
who  triumphs  over  their  distress  ?  God  forbid !  If  one 
must  err — if,  in  the  mere  tribute  of  humanity,  one  must 
needs  make  a  false  step — one's  fall  will  be  more  easy  when 
on  the  side  of  two  theological  virtues  than  when  on  the  cold, 
bare  earth  of  human  prudence.  If  I  shall,  in  my  dealings, 
have  been  too  hopeful  in  my  motives  or  too  charitable  in 
my  dealings,  I  will  take  my  chance  of  smiles  at  my  simplic- 
ity, both  on  earth  and  in  heaven.  Those  of  the  latter,  at 
least,  are  never  scornful." 

But  not  against  Rome  alone  does  impartial  history  prefer 
the  charge  of  seeking  to  secure  theological  uniformity  and 
the  dominance  of  type  by  the  ruinous  policy  of  suppres- 
sion. Passing  by  cases  where  envy,  obstinacy,  infidelity, 
hypercriticism,  disappointed  ambition,  or  mere  love  of  noto- 
riety may  have  led  to  schism  and  secession,  let  us  confine 
ourselves  to  the  men  of  marked  ability,  of  high  and  original 
character,  of  conscientious  convictions — often  sustained  by 
indisputable  learning  and  argument — for  whom  the  narrow- 
ness and  inelasticity  of  Protestant  sects  have  found  no  place. 
One  of  the  most  distinguished  examples  of  nonconformity 


48  Ecce  Clems 

to  any  prevailing  type  of  ecclesiasticism  is  Richard  Baxter. 
In  love  for  his  fellow-beings,  in  pity  for  their  sins  and  sor- 
rows, in  labors  for  their  enlightenment  and  happiness,  he  has 
probably  never  been  surpassed.  Even  the  man  who  wished 
himself  "  accursed  from  Christ  for  his  brethren's  sake,  his 
kinsmen  according  to  the  flesh,"  did  not  devote  himself 
more  unreservedly  and  unremittingly  to  the  highest  known 
form  of  benevolence — the  spiritual  salvation  of  men.  By 
his  unwearied  toils  he  transformed  the  Kidderminster  of 
his  day,  and  yet  fell  short  of  his  own  lofty  ideal  of  pastoral 
fidelity.  "  I  confess,"  he  says,  "  to  my  own  shame,  that  I 
remember  no  one  sin  that  my  conscience  doth  so  much  ac- 
cuse and  judge  me  for  as  for  doing  so  little  for  the  salvation 
of  men's  souls  and  dealing  no  more  earnestly  and  fervently 
with  them  for  their  conversion.  .  .  .  My  conscience  telleth 
me  that  I  should  follow  them  with  all  possible  earnestness 
night  and  day,  and  take  no  denial  till  they  turn  to  God." 
But  though  the  leading  features  of  Baxter's  character  and 
the  motives  of  his  life  were  simplicity  itself,  his  intellectual 
and  spiritual  grandeur,  his  unruffled  serenity  and  studied 
moderation,  his  charity,  which  never  failed,  made  him  an 
insoluble  enigma  to  the  factions  of  his  day — which  quarreled 
with  each  other,  about  the  holiest  things,  in  a  manner  the 
most  unholy  and  discreditable.  In  spite  of  his  Episcopal 
antecedents  and  training  he  became  a  Presbyterian,  and, 
while  he  loved  both  the  persons  and  the  principles  of  the 
Puritans,  he  had  no  objection  to  a  modified  form  of  episco- 
pacy, though  he  himself  declined  the  offer  of  the  bishopric 
of  Hereford. 

Roger  Williams  was  a  man  of  a  different  type.  While 
Baxter  was  irenical  and  tolerant  of  differences,  the  militant 
and  aggressive  temper  of  his  more  vigorous  and  equally 
remarkable  contemporary  led  to  agitation  and  unsettlement 
and  made  a  much  deeper  impression  on  the  ecclesiastical 
movements  of  his  time.     Williams  kept  the  Church  and 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  49 

civil  courts  of  colonial  New  England  busy,  and  filled  the 
friends  of  a  State  religion  with  constant  anxiety  and  alarm 
lest  connivance  at  or  toleration  of  his  views  as  to  the  rela- 
tion of  Church  and  State  should  lead  the  authorities  of  the 
home  government  to  withdraw  the  charter  of  the  colony. 
He  might  have  said,  in  the  words  of  another,  "  Lay  on  my 
coffin  a  sword,  for  I  was  a  brave  soldier  in  the  Liberation 
War  of  Humanity."  Two  hundred  years  and  more  in  ad- 
vance of  his  age,  he  was  not  so  intelligible  to  his  own  times 
as  he  is  to  ours.  He  is,  first,  a  clergyman  of  the  Estab- 
lished Church  of  England.  Subsequently  his  passion  for 
freedom  has  transformed  him  into  an  extreme  New  England 
Puritan.  Later  still  he  is  an  exile  and  a  martyr  for  con- 
science' sake.  And  though,  finally,  he  is  the  founder  of  the 
great  and  prosperous  Baptist  denomination  on  this  side  the 
ocean,  he  appears,  on  the  whole,  to  have  found  the  specific 
limitations  of  his  last  resort  in  the  Church  militant  quite  as 
restrictive  and  distasteful  as  any  of  the  earlier.  And  it  is 
certain  that,  if  he  had  been  a  narrow-minded  sectarian, 
after  the  model  of  his  age,  he  could  never  have  merited  the 
eulogy  of  Milton,  who  spoke  of  him  as  "  that  noble  con- 
fessor of  religious  liberty."  Nor  could  he,  as  an  ordinary 
denominationalist,  have  excited  to  the  extent  he  did  the 
odium  of  such  men  as  Dr.  Cotton  Mather,  to  whom  Rhode 
Island,  on  his  account,  was  "  the  Gerizim  of  New  England, 
the  common  receptacle  of  the  convicts  of  Jerusalem  and 
the  outcasts  of  the  land."  The  island  itself,  as  a  portion  of 
God's  creation.  Dr.  Mather  was  willing  to  think  worthy  of 
all  praise.  He  seems  to  have  felt  regarding  it  as  Bishop 
Heber  felt  in  regard  to  Ceylon  when  he  wrote  his  well- 
known  Missionary  Hymn — esteeming  it  a  place 

Where  every  prospect  pleases, 
And  only  man  is  vile. 

"  The  island  is,  indeed,  for  the  fertility  of  its  soil,  the  tem- 
perateness  of  its  air,  etc.,  the  best  garden  of  all  the  colony, 


so  Ecce  Clerus 

and  were  it  free  from  serpents^  I  would  call  it  the  paradise  of 
New  England."  As  things  were,  however,  the  good  old 
Puritan  could  only  say,  with  a  regret  from  which  one  would 
be  glad  to  believe  malice  was  absent,  ^^Bona  terra,  mala 
gens."  He  evidently  fancied  that  the  serpent  was  not  a 
native  of  the  original  home  of  human  innocence,  or  else  his 
special  affection  for  Williams  and  his  colony  led  him  to  wish 
for  them  an  exemption  from  exposures  which  God  had  not 
thought  essential  to  the  safety  and  happiness  of  the  first 
human  pair.  The  vagaries  and  fantasies  of  freedom,  its 
excesses,  outrages,  and  crimes,  are  something  fearful  to  con- 
template ;  but  freedom  is,  has  been,  and  must  ever  continue 
to  be  the  essential  condition  of  human  power  and  excel- 
lence. It  has  ever  been  the  madness  of  such  men  as  Cotton 
Mather  and  those  who  thought  and  acted  with  him  two  hun- 
dred years  ago — madness  that  could  not  claim  the  poor 
excuse  of  method — to  think  of  cutting  down  the  tree  of 
liberty  and  still  hope  to  retain  the  advantage  of  its  shade. 

Seventy  years  ago  no  one  was  the  innocent  occasion  of  a 
greater  sensation  in  ecclesiastical  circles  than  the  tall, 
stately,  eloquent  Scotchman  who  was  pastor  of  Regent's 
Square  Presbyterian  Church,  London.  For  two  years 
(1819-21)  Edward  Irving  had  been  the  assistant  of  Dr. 
Thomas  Chalmers  in  St.  John's  Church,  Glasgow,  and  was 
little  known.  When  subsequently  he  went  to  London,  and 
the  fine  Regent's  Square  structure  was  built  to  accommodate 
the  increasing  crowd  of  wealthy  and  aristocratic  people 
attending  his  powerful  and  attractive  ministry,  his  popular- 
ity grew  apace.  With  his  advancing  fame,  however,  came 
some  extravagance  of  speech  and  doctrine  leading  to  criti- 
cism, charges  of  heresy,  ecclesiastical  litigation,  and,  finally, 
expulsion  from  the  ministry.  As  Dr.  Fairbairn,  Principal  of 
Mansfield  College,  Oxford,  said  to  the  writer:  "  The  fate  of 
the  noble  fellow — great  in  mind  as  in  stature — was  ulti- 
mately determined  by  the  ministers  of  a  small  rural  presby- 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  51 

tery  in  Annan,  whose  collective  brain  force  was  not  equal 
to  that  of  the  man  they  deposed  from  the  ministry  of  the 
Church,"  An  incident  recorded  in  Dean  Ramsay's  Remi- 
niscences of  Scottish  Life  and  Character  faithfully  mirrors  the 
prevailing  opinion  of  Irving's  orthodox  fellow-countrymen. 
He  had  been  lecturing  in  Dumfries,  and  one  of  his  clerical 
admirers  in  the  town,  of  the  name  of  Watty  Dunlop,  who 
had  not  been  fortunate  enough  to  hear  the  lecture,  met  next 
day  on  the  street  a  fellow-citizen  who  had  the  reputation  of 
being  something  of  a  wag,  "  Weel,  Willie,  man,"  said  Dun- 
lop to  his  friend,  "  and  what  do  ye  think  of  Mr.  Irving }  " 
"  O,"  said  the  critic,  contemptuously,  "  the  man's  cracked  !  " 
To  which  the  quiet  but  pertinent  reply  was,  "  Willie,  ye'll 
often  see  a  licht  peeping  through  a  crack  !  "  * 

For  his  rare  organizing  genius,  masterly  power  of  com- 
mand, and  restless  evangelical  activity  John  Wesley  found 
no  place  within  the  pale  of  the  Church  to  which  he  clung, 
even  to  the  last,  with  that  same  romantic  tenacity  which 
characterized  all  his  purposes,  and  stood  out  in  marked  re- 
lief in  the  transcendently  noble  and  beautiful  example  he 
has  bequeathed  to  his  followers.  He  violated,  as  the  press- 
ing exigencies  of  the  work  successively  required,  not  only 
his  own  personal  prejudices,  but  almost  every  portion  of  the 
Episcopal  rubrics,  and,  with  a  beautifully  unconscious  in- 
consistency, died  with  the  comforting  conviction  that  he 
had  been  all  his  life  a  loyal  and  dutiful  son  of  the  Anglican 
Church.  High  Churchmen  in  England  have  written  volume 
after  volume  to  demonstrate  his  High  Church  principles  and 
practice.f  The  Low  Church,  or  evangelical  section,  with 
whose  representatives  he  was  closely  allied  during  his  whole 

*  The  greater  portion  of  Irving's  Church  in  London  remained  true  to  him  in  all  his 
troubles,  and  he  is  regarded  as  the  founder  of  what  is  known  as  "  The  Catholic  and 
Apostolic  Church "  in  England,  though  in  reality  he  had  very  little  to  do  with  its 
organization.     See  Mrs.  Oliphant's  Lzye  of  Irving. 

+  The  chief  of  these  are  John  Wesley  and  Modern  Methodism,  by  Rev.  F.  Hockin  ; 
Urlin's  Wesley's  Place  in  Church  History  ,s.x\d.\v\'s,  Churchtnati's  Life  of  Wesley  : 
Overton's  Life  of  Wesley.  Among  books  taking  an  opposite  view  is  Dr.  Rigg's 
Living  Wesley. 


52  Ecce  Clerus 

life,  has  claimed  him  as  its  corypheus  and  chieftain.  But, 
as  far  as  Wesley's  catholic-spiritedness  and  theological 
liberalism  were  concerned,  he  was  the  broadest  of  Broad 
Churchmen ,  and  in  this,  at  any  rate,  his  position  was  fairly 
reflected  in  the  late  Dean  Stanley,  as  the  following  entry  in 
his  Journal  under  date  of  August  20,  1789 — only  two  years 
before  his  death — clearly  evinces:  "I  met  the  society  (at  Red- 
ruth) and  explained  at  large  the  rise  and  nature  of  Meth- 
odism, and  still  aver  I  have  never  read  or  heard  of,  either 
in  ancient  or  modern  history,  any  other  Church  which  builds 
on  so  broad  a  foundation  as  the  Methodists  do,  which  re- 
quires of  its  members  no  conformity  either  in  opinions  or 
modes  of  worships  but  barely  the  one  things  *  to  fear  God  and 
work  righteousness.'  "  Clearly  "  this  broad  foundation,"  if  ac- 
cepted by  the  English  Episcopal  Church,  to  which  Wesley 
thought  he  continued  to  belong,  would  have  made  it  just 
what  Matthew  Arnold  wanted  it  to  be,  "  a  national  society 
for  the  promotion  of  goodness,"  and  what  Dean  Stanley 
wished  to  make  Westminster  Abbey,  "  the  embodiment  of 
his  idea  of  a  comprehensive  national  Church."  *  Equally 
obvious  is  it  that  if  British  and  American  Methodism  had 
avowedly  built  on  Wesley's  "broad  foundation,"  and  been 
content  to  impose  on  its  ministry  and  membership  no 
heavier  theological  burden  than  "  barely  the  one  thing,"  it 
must  have  worn  a  very  different  character  and  aspect  from 
what  it  does  to-day.  Since  Wesley's  time  ministers  have 
been  tried  for  heresy,  condemned  and  expelled,  whom  it  is 
certain  Wesley  himself  would  never  have  disturbed.  He 
fought  Calvinism  more  as  a  practical  hindrance  to  evangel- 
istic enthusiasm  and  success  than  as  a  theological  system, 
though  the  work  of  the  eloquent  and  highly  dramatic  Cal- 
vinist,  Whitefield,  was  even  more  fruitful  of  conversions 
than  his  own.  Himself  a  learned  and  acute  theologian,  he 
never  dreamed  of  asking  anyone  else  to   indorse  his  per- 

♦  See  art.  "  Dean  Stanley,"  in  Blackwood's  Magazine,  February,  1894. 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  S3 

sonal  and  peculiar  views;  still  less,  of  imposing  on  his 
preachers  and  people  the  voluminous  and  vague  standard 
of  faith — consisting  of  a  considerable  portion  of  his  works 
— which  is  now  tacitly  accepted  by  Methodists  of  all  de- 
nominations.* 

In  the  Church  life  of  the  century,  however,  perhaps  noth- 
ing is  more  suggestive  of  the  inadequacy  of  the  denomina- 
tional type  of  ministry  to  meet  the  ever-varying  needs  of 
the  world,  while  at  the  same  time  perpetuating  and  multi- 
plying its  own  peculiar  evils,  than  the  genesis  and  growth 
of  that  remarkable  religious  movement — the  Salvation 
Army.  William  Booth,  its  founder  and  autocratic  chief, 
was  an  ordained  clergyman  of  the  Methodist  New  Connec- 
tion— one  of  the  smallest,  least  enthusiastic,  and  least  pro- 
gressive of  the  many  sections  of  English  Methodism — but  on 
account  of  the  nonconformability  of  his  evangelistic  methods 
to  the  rules  of  the  denomination  he  was  driven  outside  the 
lines  to  become,  under  the  guidance  of  divine  Providence, 
along  with  his  devoted  and  talented  wife,  the  agent  in 
founding  a  religious  community  whose  operations  have  ex- 
tended into  many  lands,  and  whose  membership  has  grown, 
in  less  than  a  generation,  to  be  more  than  ten  times  that  of 
the  denomination  that  expelled  him.  The  irresistible  en- 
thusiasm and  absolute  freedom  from  conventional  restraint 
which  characterize  this  ever-onward-moving  wave  of  evan- 
gelism are  sufficiently  indicated  in  General  Booth's  reply  to 
one  who  asked  why  his  army  succeeded  where  everything 
else  had  failed  :  "You  see,"  said  he,  "we  have  no  reputation 
to  lose  ;  we  are  not  obliged  to  stop  and  consider  what  any- 


*  The  portion  of  Wesley's  sermons  which,  together  with  his  Notes  on  the  New  Testa- 
ment, constitutes  the  theological  standard  of  British  Methodism  has  never  been  au- 
thoritatively defined.  Though  the  subject  has  been  mooted  in  the  English  Conference 
in  recent  years,  its  discussion  has  been  significantly  deprecated  by  the  conservative 
theologians  of  the  denomination  as  inopportune  and  dangerous.  The  doctrinal  basis  of 
American  Methodism  is  still  more  vague  and  uncertain,  the  articles  of  the  Methodist 
Episcopal  Discipline  being  for  the  most  part  of  a  negative  and  controversial  character. 
Heresy  in  the  few  rare  instances  where  it  exists  is  comparatively  innocuous  because  it 
is  allowed  to  pass  unnoticed. 


54  Ecce  Clems 

body  will  say  ;  everybody  has  settled  it  that  we  are  fools,  if 
not  a  great  deal  worse ;  and,  therefore,  we  can  go  into  a 
town  and  do  exactly  what  we  think  best  without  taking  the 
least  notice  of  what  anybody  may  say  or  wish.  We  have 
only  to  please  God  and  get  the  people  saved,  and  that  is 
easily  done."* 

5.  Neither  Breadth  nor  Sublimity  in  Liberalism. 

It  is  quite  natural  to  suppose  that  the  conditions  of  a 
symmetrical  Christian  culture,  and  a  powerful  and  effective 
spiritual  manhood  and  ministry,  which  orthodoxy  apparently 
has  failed  to  supply  on  any  extensive  scale,  would  be  found 
in  liberal  Churches  ;  but  as  regards  the  freedom  which  great 
religious  souls  most  care  for — freedom  to  believe  and  preach 
God's  inexhaustible  word  unmarred  by  authoritative  human 
interpretation,  and  exemplify  and  enforce  a  thoroughgoing 
Christian  righteousness  after  the  type  of  the  Sermon  on  the 
Mount,  which  all  admire,  but  few  practically  adopt — the  sects 
that  are  the  most  ostentatiously  liberal  are,  as  a  rule,  the 
nearest  approximation  to  a  prison  of  the  spirit.  For  by  re- 
fusing to  believe  in  a  human  divinity  they  have  necessarily 
excluded  faith  in  a  divine  humanity.  By  denying  the  end- 
less retribution,  which  is  the  natural  and  inevitable  conse- 
quence of  eternal  sin  {alojviov  aiidQTijfia,  Mark  iii,  29)  they 
have  broken  the  scepter  of  the  divine  moral  government 
and  have  exposed  the  majesty  of  law  to  contempt.  By  re- 
ducing the  object  of  faith  to  bring  it  within  the  grasp  of 
reason  they  have  expatriated  infiniteness,  mystery,  moral 
grandeur,  and  spiritual  joy  from  religion,  which  is  their  true 
and  only  fatherland  and  home.  In  the  interests  of  a  narrow 
and  arid  rationalism  they  would  repress  such  aspirations  as 
that  of  the  distinguished  musician,  Samuel  Sebastian  Wes- 
ley, when,  betraying  in  his  last  moments  one  of  the  deepest 
instincts  of  the  soul,  he  said,  "  Draw  aside  the  curtain  and 

*  Beneath  Two  Flags,  p.  30. 


Domination  of  Tyipc  in  the  Ministry  65 

let  me  see  the  sky."  The  awe-inspired  inspiration  of  cath- 
olic Christianity  which  in  preachers  like  Chrysostom  and 
Savonarola  and  Massillon  and  Bossuet,  in  painters  like  Fra 
Angelico,  Da  Vinci,  and  Raphael,  in  sculptors  like  Lorenzo 
Ghiberti,  Brunelleschi,  Donatello,  and  Michael  Angelo,  in 
poets  like  Dante,  Milton,  Tennyson,  and  Whittier,  and  in 
musicians  like  Handel,  Haydn,  Bach,  and  Mozart,  has  con- 
secrated eloquence,  harmony,  art,  and  beauty  to  the  loftiest 
ends  and  made  moral  and  intellectual  nobility  something 
more  than  a  vague  dream  or  a  bare  possibility — this  greatest 
power  of  the  soul  liberalism  has  maimed,  and  left  like  a 
broken-winged  eagle  sprawling  on  the  plain  gazing  pite- 
ously  toward  the  sky,  into  which  it  has  no  power  to  soar. 
Heterodoxy  is  not  necessarily  the  synonym  of  spiritual  lib- 
erty, any  more  than  orthodoxy,  whatever  that  may  really  be, 
necessarily  means  intellectual  bondage.*  Very  close  neigh- 
bor to  the  danger  of  narrowness  and  bigotry  is  the  much 
subtler  peril  of  a  "  cheaply  won  character  for  toleration, 
which  does  not  mean  charity  at  all,  but  carelessness  for  the 
souls  of  others  and  the  absence  of  belief  in  oneself." 

As  to  the  "  liberty  of  prophesying,"  it  is  often  more  re- 
stricted in  so-called  liberal  communions  than  in  the  more 
broad-based  and  conservative  Churches ;  and  he  who  ven- 
tures to  display  the  courage  of  his  convictions  even  among 
the  professed  champions  of  breadth  and  freedom,  and 
aspires  to  be  a  knight-errant  of  the  truth,  must  be  content 
with  a  diadem  of  thorns,  as  that  gifted  young  Unitarian 
whose  dust  sleeps  in  the  fair  city  of  Florence  found  to  his 
cost  when,  at  the  high  altar  of  liberalism  in    the    city  of 


*  "  Christianity  cannot  tolerate  mental  indolence.  It  is  important  to  notice  this  be- 
cause of  the  popular  delusion  that  to  be  evangelical  ill  doctrine  is  to  be  feeble  or  out- 
worn in  mind.  It  is  supposed  that  heresy  alone  is  modern,  original,  progressive.  .  .  . 
Taken  as  an  intellectual  conception,  nothing  can  be  sublimer  than  the  evangelical 
faith.  Its  God,  its  Trinity,  its  views  of  sin,  its  cross,  its  mystery  and  glory  of  blood,  its 
spiritual  revelation,  its  spirit  of  righteousness  and  consolation,  its  day  of  judgment,  its 
eternal  life,  its  everlasting  punishment,  and  its  final  dominion  over  the  total  universe 
are  not  ideas  that  can  be  grasped  by  incompetence  or  lassitude  of  mind." — Dr.  Parser's 
Sermon  at  the  Nottingham  Free  Church  Congress. 


56  Ecce  Clerus 

Boston,  he  dared  in  his  famous  ordination  sermon,*  fifty 
years  ago,  to  challenge  the  dogmatic  postulates  of  the  Uni- 
tarianism  of  his  day,  and  subsequently,  in  the  teeth  of  the 
prevailing  sentiment  of  his  denominational  associates,  claim 
for  the  Negro,  in  chains,  the  inalienable  rights  and  immu- 
nities of  manhood. 

"«. 

6,  Manifest  Destiny  of  the  Mioisity, 

But  though,  even  in  this  advanced  age,  we  are  far  from 
realizing,  from  any  point  of  view,  the  manifest  destiny  of 
the  Christian  ministry,  and  do  not  feel  any  deep  dissatisfac- 
tion with  a  state  of  things  which  so  often  obliges  us  to  give 
to  a  sect  what  was  meant  for  humanity,  we  are  not  abso- 
lutely without  signs  of  the  coming  of  a  better  day.  There 
is  a  wider  and  fuller  recognition  of  the  fact  that  the  prime 
aim  of  religion  is  a  right  condition  of  the  heart  and  an  ex- 
emplary rectitude  of  life  rather  than  correct  methods  of 
thinking  or  subscription  to  any  particular  creed.  And  the 
growing  power  of  this  new  ideal  is  showing  itself  in  an  in- 
creased interdenominational  comity,  in  a  large  and  free 
interdenominational  cooperation  and  fellowship  like  that  of 
the  Young  People's  Society  of  Christian  Endeavor,  in  mu- 
tual annual  greetings,  in  frequent  pulpit  exchanges,  in  frank 
and  friendly  discussion  of  differences,  in  a  general  implicit 
condemnation — and  in  an  increasing  number  of  instances 
definite  disavowal — of  the  tendency  "to  raise  matters  trifling 
and  indifferent  to  the  level  of  matters  essential,  practically 
creating  new  societies  for  the  purpose  of  giving  to  such 
matters  an  importance  which  could  never  be  conceded  to 
them  in  the  larger  body  of  Christians."  There  is  an  in- 
creasingly clear  and  distinct  perception  of  the  fact  that  the 
true  orthodoxy — the  orthodoxy  of  Jesus  and  of  Paul — is 
not  so  much  a  faultless  logic  as  a  perfect  Christian  love. 

*  TAe  Transient  and  the  Permanent  in  Christianity  axiA  Discourses  of  Matters 
Pertaining  to  Religion^  Theodore  Parker's  Works,  edited  by  Francis  Power  Cobbe, 
London. 


Domination  of  Type  in  the  Ministry  57 

As  Dr.  Boyd  Carpenter,  Bishop  of  Ripen,  pertinently  re- 
marks, in  a  letter  on  the  advantages  of  conference  written 
to  the  Grindelwald  Reunion  of  Churches,  "  More  to  be 
desired  than  any  approach  to  identity  of  opinion,  or  any 
hollow  profession  of  spurious  agreement,  is  the  bettering  of 
the  spirit  in  which  we  hold  our  views.  Deepened  sympathy 
and  loftier  elevation  may  be  given  to  those  who  yet  agree 
to  differ.  It  may  be  an  open  question,  indeed,  whether 
federation  of  variety  is  not  more  advantageous  than  pale, 
perhaps  insincere,  uniformity  of  thought.  But,  however 
that  may  be,  conference  gives  men  the  opportunity  of 
understanding  one  another's  language.  .  .  .  The  removal  of 
apprehensions  ...  is  like  the  lifting  of  the  white  mists 
which  gather  round  the  mountains  and  valleys  and  obscure 
the  beauty  of  the  landscape.  Such  gains  may  be  ours  by 
conference,  without  in  the  least  seeking  anything  by  un- 
worthy compromise  of  our  intellectual  integrity.  But, 
chiefest  and  best  of  all,  we  may  be  led  to  realize  how  much 
wider  is  God's  truth  than  man's  interpretation  of  it,  and  how 
much  greater  is  the  spirit  of  Christ  than  all  controversy." 

Similar  is  the  strain  of  another  distinguished  ecclesias- 
tical leader  of  the  time,  the  Rev.  Charles  Gore,  Principal  of 
Pusey  House,  Oxford  :  "  We,  in  our  time,"  he  says,  "  have 
learned  to  give  great  prominence  to  the  virtue  of  consider- 
ateness.  The  rough  and  summary  classifications  of  men  in 
groups,  the  equally  rough  and  summary  condemnations  of 
them,  the  inconsiderate  treatment  of  heretics  and  even  of 
speculators,  these  facts  in  Church  history  strike  us  as  pain- 
ful and  unworthy.  Considerateness,  we  say,  is  a  Christian 
virtue.  '  Let  your  considerateness  be  known  unto  all  men.' 
We  look  back  to  our  Lord  and  are  astonished  that  any  can 
have  failed  to  see  his  intense  respect  for  individuality,  his 
freedom  from  fanaticism — in  a  word,  his  considerateness. 
Certainly  it  is  there.  Only,  lest  we  should  be  arrogant,  we 
need  to  remember  that  other  ages  and  other  races  have 


58  Ecce  Clerus 

caught  more  readily  in  Him  what  we  ignore — his  antagonism 
to  pride  or  to  the  selfish  assertion  of  property — and  that  the 
whole  is  not  yet  told.  Only  all  together,  all  ages,  all  races, 
both  sexes,  can  we  grow  up  in  one  body  *  unto  the  perfect 
man ; '  only  a  really  catholic  society  can  be  *  the  fullness  of 
him  that  fiUeth  all  in  all.'  Thus  we  doubt  not  that,  when 
the  day  comes  which  shall  see  the  existence  of  really  national 
Churches  in  India  and  China  and  Japan,  the  tranquillity  and 
inwardness  of  the  Hindu,  the  pertinacity  and  patience  of 
the  Chinaman,  the  brightness  and  amiability  of  the  Japan- 
ese, will  each  in  turn  receive  their  fresh  consecration  in 
Christ  and  bring  out  new  and  unsuspected  aspects  of  the 
Christian  life  ;  finding  fresh  resources  in  him  in  whom  is 
neither  Jew  nor  Greek,  neither  male  nor  female,  barbarian, 
Scythian,  bond  nor  free,  but  Christ  all  in  all."* 

*  The  Incarnation  of  the  Son  of  Gody  being  the  Bampton  Lectures  for  1891,  p.  184. 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  59 


CHAPTER  III 
The  Minister  in  the  Makings 

And  he  who  is  of  David  and  yet  before  him,  the  Word  of  God,  despising  the 
lyre  and  harp,  which  are  but  lifeless  instruments,  and  having  tuned  by  the 
Holy  Spirit  the  universe  and  especially  man — who,  composed  of  body  and 
soul,  is  a  universe  in  miniature — makes  melody  to  God  ont  his  instrument  of 
many  tones ;  and  to  this  instrument — I  mean  to  man — he  sings  accordant : 
"  For  thou  art  my  harp  and  pipe  and  temple  " — a  harp  for  harmony,  a  pipe 
by  reason  of  the  spirit,  a  temple  by  reason  of  the  word  ;  so  that  the  first  may 
sound,  the  second  breathe,  the  third  contain  the  Lord. — Clemens  Alexandri- 
nus,  "  The  Exhortation  to  the  Heathen." 

J.  The  Raw  Material, 

With  a  beautiful  fitness  the  Christian  ministry  has,  from 
the  first,  drawn  its  raw  material  and  recruited  its  ranks 
from  every  social  and  intellectual  stratum  and  from  every 
kind  of  employment,  profession,  and  pursuit.  Claiming,  as 
it  does,  a  divine  origin  and  guarantee,  perfect  catholicity  of 
scope,  and  unbroken  perpetuity  of  function,  it  is  of  all  in- 
stitutions under  the  most  solemn  bond  and  obligation  not 
"  to  give  to  a  party  what  was  meant  for  mankind."  There 
can  never  legitimately  exist  any  principle  of  discrimination 
in  the  selection  of  its  candidates  except  a  purely  moral  and 
religious  one.  The  only  strictly  absolute  condition  of  ad- 
mission to  the  sacred  service  is  the  experience  and  exempli- 
fication of  the  spiritual  life — **  the  new  man,  which  is  in 
course  of  being  renewed  unto  knowledge  after  the  image 
of  Him  that  created  him."  Apart  from  this  supreme  and 
sole  insistence,  which  has  often  been  ignored,  but  never 
with  impunity,  every  requirement  is  a  matter  of  prudence 
and  expediency.  Prince  and  peasant,  pauper  and  million- 
aire, the  handsome  and  the  homely,  men  of  the  highest 
erudition  and  most  brilliant  gifts  and  men  of  average  powers 


60  Ecce  Clerus 

and  meagerly  furnished  minds,  have  been  equally  impelled, 
by  the  divine  energy  within  them,  to  put  their  hands  "  to 
the  plow."  While,  on  the  one  hand,  the  ripest  learning 
and  capacity  of  the  world  have  been  consecrated  to  the 
labors  of  a  field  in  which  a  few  fishermen  and  others  of 
like  social  grade  were  the  honored  pioneers,  on  the  other 
hand,  a  lowly  birth,  an  obscure  pedigree,  an  empty  wallet,  or 
the  want  of  culture  has  never  been  permitted  to  discredit 
the  vessels  of  God's  election  or  handicap  admission  to  *'  the 
goodly  fellowship  of  the  prophets." 

In  receiving  to-day  some  of  the  most  eloquent  of  her 
spokesmen  and  the  ablest  of  her  leaders  and  administrators 
from  antecedently  unlikely  quarters,  the  Christian  Church 
is  not  only  in  harmony  with  the  best  traditions  of  the  past, 
but  also  secures  for  herself  the  additional  advantage  of 
keeping  in  vital  and  effective  touch  with  the  masses  to  whom 
her  message  of  mercy  is  specifically  addressed.  Whenever 
she  is  most  alive  to  her  great  opportunity  in  the  world  and 
most  loyal  to  her  exalted  Head,  who  himself  sprang  from 
unfavored  and  unpromising  soil,  she  feels  instinctively  that 
her  true  hope  is  in  the  people  ;  and  that  if  the  people  are  to 
believe  in  the  divinity  of  her  mission,  to  be  molded  by  her 
ideals  and  edified  and  helped  by  her  instructions,  she  must 
approach  them  in  a  form  that  is  truly  representative  of 
their  social  status,  and  speak  to  them  in  tones  expressive  of 
an  intelligent  and  thorough  sympathy  with  their  peculiar 
sorrows,  anxieties,  and  cares.  "  O  my  Lord,  wherewith 
shall  I  save  Israel.?  behold,  my  family  is  poor  in  Manasseh, 
and  I  am  the  least  in  my  father's  house  "  (Judg.  vi,  15), 
was  the  modest  disclaimer  of  the  youth  whom  God  called 
from  the  severe  and  exacting  toil  of  his  father's  threshing- 
floor,  in  a  time  of  national  anxiety  and  panic,  to  deliver  his 
people,  driven  by  the  myriad  hosts  of  Midian  and  Amalek 
to  hide  in  *'  dens,  and  caves,  and  strongholds "  of  the 
mountains,  and  left  by  the  periodic  raids  of  their  ruthless 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  61 

foes  with  neither  "  increase  of  the  earth,"  nor  '*  sheep,  nor 
ox,  nor  ass."  And  the  man  who  accomplished  so  much 
with  so  little — confounding  and  scattering  the  multitudinous 
host  of  the  invader  by  the  simple  device  of  lights  concealed, 
amid  the  darkness,  in  earthen  pitchers — suggested  to  the 
apostle  Paul  the  method  and  motive  of  God's  procedure  in 
the  selection  of  his  agents.  "  We  have  this  treasure  in 
earthen  vessels  that  the  transcendent  greatness  of  the  power 
{ij  v-nepPokr}  T^g  dwdnecog)  may  be  of  God,  and  not  of  us  " 
(2  Cor.  iv,  7). 

"  For  my  descent,  then,"  says  Bunyan,  with  characteristic 
open-heartedness  and  simplicity,  "  it  was,  as  is  well  known 
by  many,  of  a  low  and  inconsiderable  generation ;  my 
father's  house  being  of  that  rank  that  is  meanest  and  most 
despised  of  all  the  families  of  the  land.  Wherefore,  I  have 
not  here,  as  others,  to  boast  of  noble  blood,  and  of  an  high- 
born state  according  to  the  flesh,  though,  all  things  consid- 
ered, I  magnify  the  heavenly  Majesty  for  that  by  this  door 
he  brought  me  into  the  world  to  partake  of  the  grace  and 
life  that  is  in  Christ  by  the  Gospel."  *  And  yet,  when  that 
most  dissolute  and  despicable  of  English  kings — Charles  II 
— expressed  his  astonishment  to  Dr.  John  Owen  that  a  man 
of  his  erudition  should  go  to  hear  a  tinker  preach,  Owen, 
so  far  from  dissembling  his  deep  admiration  for  the  greatest 
preacher  and  best  known  popular  writer  of  his  age,  replied, 
"  May  it  please  your  majesty,  if  I  could  have  that  tinker's 
talent  for  preaching,  I  would  gladly  give  in  exchange  all  my 
learning." 

Some  of  the  greatest  of  the  Christian  fathers  were  the 
children  of  poverty.  Such  certainly  was  Chrysostom — 
golden-mouthed — the  Demosthenes  of  Greek  Christianity, 
whose  eloquent  and  heart-searching  expositions  of  the 
Gospel  doctrine  attracted  the  attention  of  heathen,  heretic, 
Jew,  and  Christian   alike,  and  of  whose  homilies  on  the 

♦  Grace  Abounding  to  the  Chief  of  Sinners^  p.  i. 


62  Ecce  Clerus 

Gospel  of  Matthew,  Aquinas,  the  most  famous  of  the 
schoolmen,  declared  that  to  him  they  were  "  worth  more 
than  the  whole  city  of  Paris."  Such  was  Athanasius, 
whose  consummate  courage  and  matchless  dialectic  skill 
enabled  him  at  twenty-five  to  control  the  theological  de- 
cisions of  the  Nicene  Council  and,  with  faultless  discrimina- 
tion in  the  meaning  of  vertebral  theological  terms,  elaborate 
the  most  carefully  and  subtly  worded  creed  of  early  Chris- 
tendom. *  Such  was  Augustine,  whose  writings,  steeped  in 
religious  emotion,  dominated  the  thought  and  molded  the 
theology  of  the  Western  Church  for  more  than  a  thousand 
years  ;  and  though  rapidly  yielding  to  a  nobler,  humaner, 
and  more  reasonable  interpretation  of  Christ's  teachings,  can 
hardly  be  said  to  have  entirely  lost  their  savor  even  to-day.  f 
Such  were  the  Irish  missionaries  who  followed  Columba  to 
the  southwest  of  Scotland  in  the  early  part  of  the  sixth 
century.  From  the  bleak  and  barren  gneiss-rock  which 
they  had  selected  as  their  home  amid  the  outer  Hebrides 
the  monks  of  lona,  and  later  those  of  its  offshoot — Lindis- 
farne — on  the  east  coast,  bore  the  torch  of  saving  truth 
through  a  large  portion  of  western  Europe  in  the  seventh 
and  eighth  centuries — a  period  notorious  for  its  intellectual 
gloom,  sanguinary  strifes,  and  social  disintegration.  In  the 
heart  of  the  English  Midlands,  where,  as  the  historian  re- 
marks, "  heathendom  fought  desperately  for  life,"  Lichfield 
Cathedral  stands,  to-day,  a  beautiful  and  enduring  memorial 
of  one  of  them — Ceadda — the  St.  Chad  to  whom  it  is  still 
dedicated.  "  So  simple  and  lowly  in  temper  "  was  he  "  that 
he  traveled  on  foot,  on  his  long  mission  journeys,  till  Arch- 
bishop Theodore  with  his  own  hands  lifted  him  on  horse- 
back." And  where  now  rise  the  stately  and  ivy-crowned 
ruins  of  Melrose  Abbey  in  the  Scotch  lowlands — the  region 

*  With  the  Athanasian  Creed,  so-called,  the  thrice-banished  bishop  of  Alexandria 
had  nothing  to  do,  it  being  the  production  of  a  much  later  age. 

t  Patricius,  father  of  Augustine,  was  of  noble  birth,  but,  like  many  noble  Romans  of 
his  day,  of  slender  and  precarious  fortune. 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  63 

of  **  Cheviot  and  Laramermoor,  Ettrick  and  Teviotdale, 
Yarrow  and  Annan-water,"  which  are  still  "musical  with 
old  ballads  and  border  minstrelsy,"  is  the  scene  of  the 
labors  of  another — the  Apostle  of  the  Lowlands — Cuthbert. 
His  favorite  haunts  were  the  "  remoter  mountain  villages  " 
— groups  of  "  straw-thatched  log  huts  in  the  midst  of  un- 
tilled  solitudes  " — from  whose  roughness  and  poverty  other 
teachers  turned  aside.  "  His  patience,  his  humorous  good 
sense,  the  sweetness  of  his  look,  told  for  him,  and  not  less 
the  stout,  vigorous  frame  which  fitted  the  peasant-preacher 
for  the  hard  life  he  had  chosen.  *  Never  did  man  die  of 
hunger  who  served  God  faithfully,'  he  would  say  to  his  com- 
panions when  nightfall  found  them  supperless  in  the  waste. 
'  Look  at  the  eagle  overhead  !  God  can  feed  us  through 
him  if  he  will ' — and  once,  at  least,  he  owed  his  meal  to  a 
fish  that  the  scared  bird  let  fall.  A  snowstorm  drove  his 
boat  on  the  coast  of  Fife.  *  The  snow  closes  the  road  along 
the  shore '  mourned  his  comrades ;  *  the  storm  bars  our  way 
over  sea.'  *  There  is  still  the  way  of  heaven  that  lies  open,' 
said  Cuthbert."  *  Such  noble  souls  show  how,  amid  the 
sorrows  and  anxieties  of  a  life  of  material  want,  toil,  and 
hardship,  may  be  cultivated  a  true  wealth  of  heart,  content- 
ment of  mind,  and  majesty  of  character. 

How  poor  would  have  seemed  the  boasted  intellectual 
splendor  of  the  Renaissance,  or  the  still  grander  moral  and 
spiritual  triumphs  of  the  Reformation,  without  the  name  of 
the  little  German  boy  who  sang,  barefooted  and  bareheaded, 
in  the  streets  of  Eisenach  for  his  daily  bread!  The  man 
who  made  Erfurth  and  Wittenberg  household  words,  whose 
magnificent  personality  still  haunts  the  narrow  streets  of 
Worms — most  hoary  and  most  venerable  of  German  cities — 
and  the  grim  old  castle  of  the  Wartburg,  was  emphatically  the 
child  of  penury  and  indigence,  whose  father  earned  a  pre- 
carious livelihood,  as  a  lead  miner,  amid  the  barren  moun- 

♦  Green's  History  of  the  English  People,  vol.  i,  p.  54. 


64  Ecce  Clerus 

tains  of  Saxony.  Hooker,  whose  place  even  to-day  is  that 
of  a  prince  among  English  thinkers  and  theologians,  and 
whose  name  stands  easily  first  as  a  master  of  stately  Eliza- 
bethan prose,  was  a  poor,  fatherless  and  friendless  boy 
when  the  discerning  Bishop  Jewell  discovered  in  him  "  a 
diamond  in  the  rough,"  and  resolved  to  give  him,  at  his 
own  expense,  the  coveted  advantage  of  an  Oxford  training. 
Calvin's  fine  genius  and  precocious  gravity  made  him  a 
tonsured  ecclesiastic  and  brought  him  Church  preferment 
as  a  boy  of  twelve,  in  his  native  diocese  of  Noyon,  and  won 
him  the  favor  of  his  noble  and  wealthy  neighbors  the  Mont- 
mors,  with  whom  he  mostly  lived  and  by  whose  generous 
munificence  he  received  the  best  education  his  age  could 
afford — under  such  Latinists  as  Corderius,  such  Hellenists 
as  Melchior  Wolmar,  and  such  jurists  as  Pierre  de  I'Etoile 
and  Andreas  Alciati — the  latter  being  reputed  the  ablest 
law  professor  in  Europe.  But  the  eminent  Dutch  divine 
Arminius,  whose  doctrine  of  redemption,  after  centuries  of 
unbroken  conflict  with  Calvinism,  has  now  everywhere  van- 
quished the  older  system  and  brought  about  the  liberaliza- 
tion and  expansion  of  religious  thought,*  was  less  fortunate 
in  his  birth  and  early  circumstances,  being  left  fatherless 
in  infancy,  and  fitted  for  the  place  he  adorned  in  the  new 
University  of  Leyden  in  a  disputatious  and  stormy  age,  first 
by  the  aid  of  generous  friends,  and  then  at  the  cost  of  the 
Merchants'  Guild  of  Amsterdam  by  recommendation  of  the 
burgomasters.  Peter  Bertius  notes  that  "his  widowed 
mother,  who  as  long  as  she  survived  led  a  life  of  piety,  was 

*  Dr.  Jortin,  in  his  Dissertations,  says:  "In  England,  at  the  time  of  the  Synod  of 
Dort,  we  also  were  much  divided  in  our  religious  opinions  concerning  the  controverted 
articles  (five  articles  of  the  Remonstrants),  but  our  divines  having  taken  the  liberty  to 
think  and  judge  for  themselves,  and_  the  civil  government  not  interposing,  it  hath 
come  to  pass  that  from  that  time  to  this  almost  all  persons  here  of  any  note  for  learn- 
ing and  abilities  have  bid  adieu  to  Calvinism,  have  sided  with  the  Remonstrants,  and 
have  left  the  Fatalists  to  follow  their  own  opinions  and  to  rejoice  (since  they  can 
rejoice)  in  a  religious  system  consisting  of  human  creatures  without  liberty,  doctrines 
without  sense,  faith  without  reason,  and  a  God  without  mercy." 

"  His  sermons,  lectures,  and  orations,"  says  the  famous  Anglicized  Frenchman, 
John  Fletcher,  speaking  ot  Arminius.  "  made  many  ashamed  of  absolute  reprobation, 
and  the  bad-principled  Gadi  who  was  before  quietly  worshiped  all  over  Holland." 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  65 

called  to  the  exercise  of  the  utmost  frugality  in  the  mainte- 
nance of  herself  and  her  three  fatherless  children."  * 

The  exemplary,  almost  ideal,  domestic  life  of  the  parents 
of  the  Wesleys  was  one  constant  battle  with  straitened  cir- 
cumstances— an  unremittent  strain  of  anxiety  and  effort  to 
educate  their  children  and  keep  the  proverbial  wolf  from 
the  door.  No  two  persons,  probably,  ever  gave  so  much  to 
the  world  in  their  gifted  offspring  and  received  so  little 
from  it  in  return  as  Samuel  and  Susanna  Wesley,  f  Their 
most  distinguished  son,  John,  was  probably  never  worth 
$200,  in  his  own  right,  during  the  whole  of  his  long,  labori- 
ous, and  singularly  useful  life,  and  yet  if  he  had  adopted  as 
his  motto  the  apostolic  words,  o)g  nroixoi  noXXovg  de  ttAov- 
Tl^ovTeg,l  nothing  could  have  been  more  felicitously  appro- 
priate. §  In  1790 — the  year  before  his  death — he  ceased 
his  lifelong  practice  of  noting  down  the  details  of  his  per- 
sonal expenditure.  "  I  will  not  attempt  it  any  longer,"  he 
says,  "being  satisfied  with  the  continual  conviction  that  I 
save  all  I  can  and  give  all  I  can — that  is,  all  I  have."  || 
When  he  died,  at  the  ripe  age  of  eighty-eight,  he  had  little 
more  to  dispose  of  by  will,  apart  from  the  revenue  from  his 
writings,  than  the  six  sovereigns  which  he  bequeathed  to 
six  poor  men  who  carried  him  to  his  grave,  and  a  bunch  of 
skeleton  keys,  which,  though  handed  over  annually  with 

*  Funeral  oration. 

t  For  three  successive  generations,  as  Mr.  Augustine  Birrell  points  out  in  his  lecture 
on  John  Wesley,  the  Wesleys  had  been  harassed  and  kept  poor  by  various  legal  diflS- 
culties. 

t  2  Cor.  vi,  10,  As  poor,  while  yet  enriching  many. 

§  In  the  Odyssey,  TZTUXoi  (beggarmen),  like  ^evoi  (guests),  are  regarded  as  sharing  in 
a  special  manner  the  divine  pity  and  protection.  It  is  not  too  much  to  suppose  that  in 
the  apostle's  use  of  the  word  there  is  a  subtle  reference  to  this  interesting  parallel  be- 
tween the  Christian  and  the  pagan  nTUX^Q.  It  is  the  manner  of  Paul  halfplayfully 
to  mark  these  coincidences.  At  Athens  he  noted  In  this  semi-humorous  strain  how 
members  of  different  philosophic  sects  in  the  city  sneered  at  him  contemptuously  as  a 
CTrepixoXoyog  (a  picker-up  of  seeds) — a  hungry  bird  of  passage  snatching  a  hasty 
mouthful  from  the  busy  street  where  he  happened  to  alight.  Students  of  the  Life  of 
St.  Francis  of  Assisi  know  how  large  a  place  this  ancient  sentiment,  that  the  poor  are 
the  special />-<7/^^^j  of  heaven,  fills  in  the  practicallife  of  that  noblest  and  sweetest  of 
Italian  saints,  and  in  that  of  the  early  Franciscans.     See  Life,  by  Paul  Sabatier. 

II  Telford's  Life  of  Wesley.,  p.  345. 

5 


66  Ecce  Clerus 

dramatic  solemnity — together  with  a  Bible  he  used — to  each 
succeeding  president  of  the  Wesleyan  Conference  by  his 
predecessor  in  office,  no  one  has  ever  yet  discovered  the 
use  of,  and  probably  no  one  ever  will.  His  eloquent  co- 
adjutor, Whitefield,  earned  his  living  in  his  boyhood  by 
drawing  foaming  jugs  of  ale  for  his  widowed  mother's 
customers,  and  blacking  the  boots  of  gentlemen  who  visited 
her  inn  in  the  old  city  of  Gloucester.  The  other  original 
members  of  the  Oxford  Club  lived  in  well-feathered  nests 
and  died  in  them,  and  their  names  are  now  almost  for- 
gotten. * 

The  leading  ministers  of  the  early  Methodist  Church, 
though  men  of  scholarly  habits  and  attainments,  and  mostly 
eloquent  and  successful  preachers,  were  all  poor  men,  and 
leaned  by  force  of  natural  sympathy  toward  their  social 
kindred  in  the  lowlier  ranks  of  life.  **  Their  voices  were 
heard  in  the  wildest  and  most  barbarous  corners  of  the  land, 
in  the  dens  of  London,  or  in  the  long  galleries  where  in 
the  pauses  of  his  labor  the  Cornish  miner  listens  to  the 
sobbing  of  the  sea."  When  that  justly  celebrated  orientalist 
and  commentator — Dr.  Adam  Clarke — arrived,  as  a  youth, 
at  Kingswood  School,  near  Bristol,  the  earliest  of  Wesleyan 
educational  institutions,  where  he  hoped  to  spend  a  short 
period  in  better  preparing  himself  for  the  Methodist  min- 
istry, he  did  not  have  the  equivalent  of  more  than  three 
cents  in  his  purse  ;  f  and  this  almost  pathetic  impecuniosity, 
so  far  from  being  singular,  only  established  an  additional 
point  of  conformity  between  him  and  the  great  majority  of 
his  fellow-evangelists.  No  one  can  doubt  that  the  early  in- 
timate fellowship  of  the  renowned  Father  Taylor  with  illit- 
eracy, poverty,  and  scantily  remunerated  toil,  as  a  common 
sailor  before  the  mast  and  in  various  later  efforts  to  earn 


*  This  is  the  case,  in  spite  of  Tyerman's  labored  effort  to  confer  immortality  upon 
them  in  his  Oxford  Methodists. 
t  Etheridge's  Life  of  Dr.  A.  Clarke,  p.  64. 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  67 

a  livelihood,  largely  accounts  for  the  intuitive  and  intense 
sympathy  with  the  sorrows,  cares,  and  aspirations  of  the 
people  which  so  greatly  contributed  to  his  remarkable  suc- 
cess, in  the  city  of  Boston,  as  a  preacher  to  poor  seamen  for 
more  than  forty  years.  "  No  American  citizen — Webster, 
Clay,  Everett,  Lincoln,  Choate  " — says  Dr.  Bartol,  "  has  a 
reputation  more  impressive  and  unique.  In  the  hall  of 
memory  his  spiritual  statue  will  have  forever  its  own 
niche.  .  .  .  He  stands  for  the  sea ;  the  greatest  delegate 
the  ocean  has  sent  upon  the  stage  of  any  purely  intellectual 
calling,  at  least  in  this  part  of  the  world.*  Even  Spurgeon, 
equally  eminent  as  a  pastor,  preacher,  commentator,  author, 
educator,  and  philanthropist,  was  obliged  to  forego  the  ad- 
vantage of  a  university  training  because  his  parents  had  no 
money  to  pay  for  it;  and  the  vivid  remembrance  of  diffi- 
culties encountered  and  conquered  in  his  youth  inspired 
the  unfaltering  hope  and  courage  with  which  he  labored  to 
rescue  the  victims  of  sin  and  temptation  around  him  from 
the  wreck  of  fortune,  health,  and  character,  and  from  the 
social  submergence  and  chronic  heartache  and  hopelessness 
which  are  otherwise  their  almost  certain  fate. 

It  is  impossible  not  to  see  the  immense  advantage  to  the 
Christian  Church  of  this  intimate  personal  acquaintance  of 
her  ministry,  in  its  nobler  and  more  efficient  types,  with  the 
wholesome,  though  unwelcome,  discipline  of  poverty.  On 
the  one  hand,  it  offers  some  guarantee  for  the  continued 
applicability  and  force  of  that  very  important  item  in  her 
Founder's  program  which,  deeply  considered,  is  really  a 
summary  of  the  whole :  *'  The  poor  have  the  Gospel 
preached  to  them."  On  the  other,  it  serves  to  shield  a  class 
which,  in  spite  of  certain  economic  theories  and  socialistic 
dreams  of  the  age,  will  always  comprise  the  great  majority 
of  mankind — namely,  the  industrial  and  meritorious  poor — 
from  the  false  feeling  forced  upon  them  by  the  classes  above 

*  Father  Taylor^  ike  Sailor  Preacher,  p.  425.     Haven  and  Russell. 


68  Ecce  Clerus 

them,  and  by  those  among  themselves,  who  have  an  ax  to 
grind,  that  intellectual  refinement,  social  worth,  and  moral 
self-respect  and  dignity  are  impossible  without  money. 
This  impression,  as  maleficent  and  insidious  as  it  is  difficult 
to  destroy,  needs  to  be  wiped  clean  out  of  the  heart  and 
thought  of  the  people  before  the  teachings  of  Jesus  can 
reach,  inspire,  and  elevate  them  to  any  appreciable  extent ; 
and  nothing  is  better  fitted  to  demonstrate  its  unreality  and 
emptiness  than  the  cheerful  advent  among  them  of  that  mes- 
senger of  peace  whose  "  feet  are  beautiful  upon  the  moun- 
tains," even  though  he  come  with  "neither  purse,  nor  scrip, 
nor  shoes." 

The  fact  has  a  significance  of  its  own,  that  the  sanction 
and  indorsement  of  piety  in  its  lowlier  forms  on  the  part  of 
the  ministers  of  Jesus,  by  their  personal  acceptance  of  its 
material  anxieties  and  cares,  has  been  a  principal  feature  of 
every  genuine  revival  of  a  pure  and  uncorrupted  Christian- 
ity. It  was  remarkably  prominent  in  the  age  of  its  genesis 
and  juvenility,  and  though  often  buried  deep  for  centuries 
together,  it  has  been  regularly  resurrected  with  every  serious 
and  really  successful  effort  to  recover  the  simplicity  and 
power  of  the  Gospel,  to  recall  men's  minds  to  its  incom- 
parably lofty  ethical  standard  and  redeem  the  fallen  fortunes 
and  declining  prestige  of  the  Church.  No  mission  to  the 
heathen  ever  succeeds  without  it — that  is,  if  we  gauge  and 
estimate  success  according  to  the  intensely  spiritual  stand- 
ard which  the  genius  and  spirit  of  the  Gospel  itself  supplies. 
It  was,  in  great  part,  the  secret  of  Xavier's  great  work  in 
India  and  Japan,  of  John  Eliot's  power  over  the  red  men 
of  colonial  Massachusetts;  of  Brainerd's  over  the  tribes  of 
the  Delaware  and  Susquehanna;  of  the  triumphs  of  the 
early  Moravian  missionaries  in  such  diverse  and  widely  dis- 
tant latitudes  as  Greenland  and  the  West  Indies,  and  it  ex- 
plains, in  the  opinion  of  a  shrewd  observer,*  the   growing 

*  Hon.  W.  S.  Caine,  LetUrs/rom  India. 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  69 

popularity  of  the  Salvation  Army  to-day  among  the  poly- 
glotal  peoples  of  India.  Brahmanism,  Buddhism,  and 
Mohammedanism — the  three  great  religions  which  have 
successively  striven  for  supremacy,  and  have  deeply  influ- 
enced, and  are  to-day  deeply  influencing,  the  destinies  of 
millions  of  mankind — have  alike  consecrated  poverty  as 
Christ  did,  and  though  the  devotees  of  these  religions  have 
no  idea  of  the  motive  that  ennobles  and  exalts  it  in  its 
Christian  form,  they  cannot  easily  understand  any  religion 
that  eliminates  and  ignores  it.  More  than  sixty  years  ago 
Edward  Irving,  that  most  majestic  of  Scotch  orators — if  we 
except,  perhaps,  his  friend  Chalmers — greatly  offended  the 
managers  and  friends  of  the  London  Missionary  Society 
when,  accepting  their  urgent  invitation  to  preach  their  an- 
nual missionary  sermon,  he  selected  for  his  text  the  words 
of  the  divine  commission  :  "  Go  your  ways  :  behold,  I  send 
you  forth  as  lambs  among  wolves.  Carry  neither  purse,  nor 
scrip,  nor  shoes ;  "  and  powerfully  urged  the  applicability  of 
the  apostolic  principle  of  self-support  to  modern  missionary 
enterprise.  And  yet  to  the  present  writer  nothing  seems 
more  impotent  and  unpromising  than  the  attempt  to  evan- 
gelize the  diversely-habited,  diversely-mannered,  many- 
traditioned,  and  many-tongued  heathen  world,  with  its  pre- 
historic and  hoary  civilizations,  by  simply  sending  them 
first-class  specimens  of  the  modern  educated  gentleman, 
often  wholly  unschooled  in  the  systems  of  thought  which 
confront  him  on  the  threshold  of  his  work,  and  heavily 
handicapped  from  the  outset  with  the  prejudices,  manner- 
isms, and  sense  of  superiority  which  are  the  peculiar  vices 
of  a  civilization  which  in  itself,  as  compared  with  other  and 
earlier  types,  has  no  intrinsic  and  peculiar  moral  value  what- 
ever ;  vices  which  serve  only  to  emphasize  painfully  and 
invidiously  the  contrast  between  the  social  and  religious 
system  he  represents,  and  the  social  and  religious  institu- 
tions he  hopes  to  reform.      As  long  as  the  Augustinian, 


70  Ecce  Clerus 

Benedictine,  Dominican,  Franciscan,  Cistercian,  Carmelite, 
and  Moravian  communities  were  brotherhoods  of  poverty 
they  were  brotherhoods  of  moral  and  spiritual  power. 
Their  intense  sympathy  with  the  people,  even  when  it  as- 
sumed grotesque  and  repulsive  forms,  was  electrical,  and 
made  their  simple  exhortations  irresistible  to  peasant  and 
prince  alike.  There  was  something  indescribably  sublime 
in  the  enthusiam,  kept  constantly  at  a  white  heat,  of  men 
who  the  more  they  scorned  the  ordinary  privileges  and 
pleasures  of  life  the  more  firmly  they  seemed  to  grasp  the 
secret  of  all  inner  and  essential  joys.  And  the  voluntary 
assumption  of  a  condition  which  seemed  to  rob  them  of  the 
smallest  crumb  of  earthly  comfort,  while  it  reserved  to  them 
the  richest  and  rarest  music  of  the  heart — the  strange  union 
of  a  poverty-stricken  exterior  with  an  incalculable  store  of 
inward  wealth — found,  for  all  men  of  spiritual  insight,  a  suf- 
ficient explanation  in  the  characteristic  avowal  of  St.  Francis 
of  Assisi  to  his  boon  companions  at  the  outstart  of  the 
Grand  Renunciation,  that  he  had  resolved  to  marry  a 
lovely  lady  who  for  more  than  a  thousand  years  had 
mourned  her  widowhood  in  seclusion  and  silence — the  Lady 
Poverty  ;  or,  in  the  saying  of  the  Calabrian,  Gioacchino  Di 
Fiore,  "  Qui  vere  monachus  est  nihil  reputat  esse  suum  nisi 
citharam  "  (He  who  is  a  monk  in  truth  considers  nothing  to 
be  his  except  his  harp). 

2.  The  Molding  of  Environment, 

But  if  the  Christian  religion  has  found  the  exponents  of 
its  primary  and  essential  verities,  the  exemplars  of  its  lofti- 
est virtues,  and  the  ablest  champions  of  its  beliefs,  doctrines, 
and  invigorating  moral  discipline  not  among  the  wordly 
wise,  the  wealthy,  or  the  nobly  born  {^vyevetg)*  it  cannot 
be  said  that  in  summoning  men  to  the  work  of  the  Gospel 
ministry  the  "  Searcher  of  hearts  "  does  not  discriminate,  and 

♦  I  Cor.  i,  26. 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  71 

seek  the  gifted  "  heralds  of  salvation  "  where,  to  his  all-seeing 
eye,  they  are  the  likeliest  to  be  found.  It  was  not  because 
Amos  was  a  poor,  hard-working  herdsman  of  Tekoa  that  he 
was  called  to  exercise  the  prophetic  office  and  unveil  those 
great  principles  of  God's  moral  government  of  the  world, 
which  he  saw  working  in  his  own  day  secretly  and  silently 
toward  more  vivid  disclosure  and  fuller  vindication  in  a 
future  age.  Nor,  on  the  other  hand,  were  the  seraphic  de- 
votion, the  brilliant  gifts,  and  the  exemplary  patriotism  of 
Isaiah  passed  by  because  he  chanced  to  be  of  princely  birth 
and  breeding.  The  bare  fact  that  Simon  was  poor,  and 
caught  fish  for  a  living,  did  not  specially  qualify  him  for  the 
apostolate  or  commend  him  to  Jesus  as  the  fittest  to  be  first 
among  the  twelve.  Nor  was  the  Tarsian  academician,  the 
accomplished  graduate  of  Asia's  most  famous  school  of 
learning  and  distinguished  pupil  of  Gamaliel — prince  of 
Palestinian  rabbis  of  his  day — discredited  on  account  of  his 
aristocratic  descent,*  or  debarred  by  his  learning  and  logical 
acuteness  from  being  a  preacher  to  the  illiterate  multitude; 
God's  chosen  vessel  to  bear  among  the  Gentiles  the  fra- 
grance of  the  only  "  name  under  heaven  given  among  men, 
whereby  we  must  be  saved." 

The  great  preachers  and  doctors  of  Christendom,  in  every 
age,  have  been  men  who  enjoyed  in  their  birth,  childhood, 
and  youth  morally  wholesome  and  auspicious  surroundings. 
And  if  there  is  any  atom  of  truth  in  the  old  saying,  *'  The 
rockers  of  the  cradle  are  the  rulers  of  the  world,"  it  prob- 
ably finds  its  first  and  highest  application  here.  The  in- 
cidence of  the  divine  choice  seems  to  be  largely  determined 
by  two  factors  which  have  always  been  present  and  prom- 
inent in  the  history  of  human  development,  namely,  hered- 
ity and  environment.  These  two  factors  "  are  the  master 
influences  of  the  organic  world.  These  have  made  all  of 
us  what  we  are.     These  forces  are  still  ceaselessly  playing 

«  Phil,  iii,  5. 


72  Ecce  Clems 

upon  all  our  lives.  And  he  who  truly  understands  these 
influences ;  he  who  has  decided  how  much  to  allow  to 
each  ;  he  who  can  regulate  new  forces  as  they  arise  and  ad- 
just them  to  the  old,  so  directing  them  as  at  one  moment 
to  make  them  cooperate,  at  another  to  counteract  one  an- 
other, understands  the  rationale  of  personal  development. 
To  seize  continuously  the  opportunity  of  more  and  more 
perfect  adjustment  to  better  and  higher  conditions,  to  bal- 
ance some  inward  evil  with  some  purer  influence,  acting 
from  without — in  a  word,  to  make  our  environment  at  the 
same  time  that  it  is  making  us — these  are  the  secrets  of  a 
well-ordered  and  successful  life."  * 

The  influence  of  home  and  of  early  association  and  en- 
vironment on  some  of  the  most  notable  actors  on  the  stage 
of  ecclesiastical  history  is  strongly  marked  and  easily  trace- 
able. The  devout  and  gentle  spirit  of  his  mother,  Anthusa, 
left  its  own  deep  and  indelible  impression  on  Chrysostom, 
as  he  himself  informs  us,  and  to  her  maternal  oversight  and 
mastery  of  the  noblest  of  all  the  arts,  the  art  of  molding 
character,  we  are  largely  indebted  for  one  of  the  grandest 
figures  on  the  historical  horizon  of  the  early  Church. 
Athanasius,  the  distinguished  expositor  and  apologist  of 
the  Nicene  Christology,  breathed  from  earliest  childhood 
the  wholesome  atmosphere  of  earnest  religious  thought  and 
practical  philanthropy,  being  bred  in  the  home  of  the  pri- 
mate of  Alexandria,  and  allowed  frequently  to  visit  in  his 
boyhood  the  retired  haunts  of  St.  Anthony,  the  hermit  of 
the  Nile.  Of  Monica,  mother  of  Augustine,  Neander  says : 
'*  Whatever  treasures  of  virtue  and  worth  the  life  of  faith, 
even  of  a  soul  not  trained  by  scientific  culture,  can  bestow 
were  set  before  him  in  the  example  of  his  pious  mother ; " 
and  that  great  light  of  the  Latin  Church  and  episcopate  has 
more  than  once  embalmed,  in  his  writings,  the  memory  of 
his  mother  in  the  expression  of  his  gratitude  for  her  tender- 

•  Drummond's  Natural  Laiu  in  the  Spiritual  World,  p.  183. 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  73 

ness  and  solicitude.*  Anselm,  deservedly  designated  the 
chief  of  mediaeval  theologians  {scholasticorum  doctorum prin- 
ceps)  by  his  admiring  disciple  and  inseparable  companion, 
Eadmer,  of  Canterbury,  and  certainly  one  of  the  brightest 
lights  vouchsafed  by  divine  Providence  to  a  dark  and  dismal 
age,  owed  everything  to  the  pious  care  and  attentions  of  his 
mother,  Ermenberga,f  and  his  boyish  heart  bitterly  bewailed 
her  loss  when  she  died,  and  felt  like  a  ship  that  had  slipped 
its  anchor — almost  entirely  overwhelmed  amid  the  tossing 
billows  of  the  world.  J 

The  mother  of  Luther  was  a  woman  of  tender  heart  and 
noble  mind,  exemplar  virtuium  (a  pattern  of  the  virtues), 
as  Melanchthon  calls  her,  and  her  love  served  to  mitigate 
the  unwarrantably  severe  disciplinary  regime  of  the  father, 
Melanchthon,  on  the  other  hand — so  named  by  his  erudite 
kinsman  Reuchlin, prince  of  Hebrew  scholars  asMelanchthon 
was  of  Greek — was  from  infancy  a  child  of  too  much  love 
and  too  many  favors.  With  the  gentleness  and  amiability 
of  a  woman,  he  would  hardly  have  weathered  the  tempests 
of  the  Reformation  had  he  not  been  sheltered  and  strength- 
ened by  association  with  rougher  and  more  strenuous  na- 
tures. Calvin — ^peculiarly  fortunate  in  his  home  and  friends, 
his  schools,  and  teachers — was  from  the  first  marked  for 
supremacy,  and  yet  it  was  not  the  "  still  small  voice"  of  the 
home,  or  the  school,  or  the  temple  that  discovered  the  depth 
and  strength  and  nobleness  of  his  nature,  but  the  storm  and 
earthquake  of  conflict  and  the  fierce  fires  of  controversy, 

*  Confessiones,  Book  ix,  33.  From  the  De  Vita  Beata  Dr.  Pusey  translates  the  fol- 
lowing beautiful  tribute  addressed  by  St.  Angustine  to  his  mother.  "You  through 
whose  prayers  I  undoubtedly  believe  and  affirm  that  God  gave  me  that  mind  that  I 
should  prefer  nothing  to  the  discovery  of  truth ;  wish,  think  of,  love  naught  besides." 
In  De  bono  PerseveranticE  he  says,  "  To  the  faithful  and  daily  tears  of  my  mother  it 
was  granted  that  I  should  not  pensh." 

t  Hugo  Laemmer,  in  the  Preface  to  his  edition  of  the  Cur  Deus  Homo  ?  p.  3,  says, 
^'' Pater  quidem  Gundulfus  rerunt  fatniliaruvt  incuriosus  nee  tarn  largus  quant 
prodigus  pro:  negotiis  secularibus  instituendum  neglexit  filium,  mater  autem^  Er- 
menberga  officiis  dotnesticis  probe  functa  inde  a  prima  pueritia  illius  pectus  pietate 
studuit  imbuere" 

t  "  Navis  cordis  eius,  quasi  anchor  a  per dita,  in  fiuctus  sceculi  pcene  iota  dilapsa 
est."    Praef.  edition,  p.  4. 


74  Ecce  Clerus 

thus  illustrating  the  sentiment  of  Goethe,  that  "  talent  forms 
itself  in  solitude,  character  in  the  stream  of  life."  *  He 
has  himself  told  us,  in  the  Preface  to  his  Commentary  on 
the  Psalms,  how  the  stern  mandate  of  his  lifelong  friend 
Farel,  enforced  by  a  still  sterner  malediction,  compelled 
him  to  arm  for  the  fight  and  set  his  face  toward  the  foe. 
He  was  passing  through  Geneva,  August  5,  1536,  intending 
to  leave  next  day,  but  Farel,  with  an  insight  and  sagacity 
almost  prophetic,  solemnly  threatened  him  with  the  curse 
of  heaven  if  he  preferred  his  studies  to  the  work  of  God, 
that  now  required  his  prompt  assistance.  "  These  words," 
says  Calvin,  "terrified  and  shook  me  as  if  God  from  on  high 
had  stretched  out  his  hand  to  stop  me,  so  that  I  renounced 
the  journey  I  had  undertaken."  f  Arminius  had  been  so 
well  cared  for  by  his  friends  and  widowed  mother  as  to 
draw  from  Beza,  whose  lectures  he  attended  at  Geneva,  a 
eulogium  addressed  to  the  clergy  and  magistrates  of  Am- 
sterdam, of  which  any  youth  might  well  be  proud.J  Even 
Wesley's  truly  wonderful  work  ceases  altogether  to  appear 
miraculous  when  we  remember  the  intellectual  nobleness 
and  moral  grandeur  of  his  parents,  notably  of  his  mother, 
and  the  care  with  which  she  attended  to  his  early  educa- 
tion and  religious  training. 


*  "  Es  bildei  ein  Talent  sick  in  der  stille 
Sick  ein  Charakter  in  dent  Strom  der  IVeit." 

+  Calvin,  like  all  great  souls,  was  a  many-sided  man,  but  one  aspect  of  his  character, 
and  a  very  important  one,  seems  to  be  entirely  lost  sight  of  in  the  estimate  of  the 
present  age.  With  strong  and  deep  convictions,  and  a  logical  acuteness  amply  com- 
petent to  defend  them,  he  blended  great  tenderness  of  feeling  and  a  large  capacity  for 
friendship.  As_  Dr.  Schaff  remarks,  "  Men,  by  a  blessed  inconsistency,  are  often 
kinder  than  their  creeds." 

i  "  From  thp  period  when  Arminius  returned  from  Basle  to  us  at  Geneva  both  his 
acquirements  in  learning  and  his  manner  of  life  have  been  so  approved  by  us  that  we 
form  the  highest  hopes  respecting  him,  if  he  proceed  in  the  same  course  as  that  which 
he  is  now  pursuing.  .  .  .  For  the  Lord  has  conferred  on  him,  among  other  endowments, 
a  happy  genius  for  clearly  perceiving  the  nature  of  things  and  forming  a  correct  judg- 
ment upon  them,  which,  if  it  be  hereafter  brought  under  the  governance  of  piety, 
of  which  he  shows  himself  most  studious,  will  undoubtedly  cause  his  powerful  genius, 
after  it  has  been  matured  by  years  and  confirmed  by  his  acquaintance  with  things,^  to 
produce  a  rich  and  most  abundant  harvest.  These  are  our  sentiments  concerning 
Arminius,  a  young  man,  as  far  as  we  have  been  able  to  form  a  judgment  of  him,  in  no 
respect  unworthy  of  your  benevolence  and  liberality." — Letter  of  Beza  to  Rev,  Martin 
Lydius,  Works  of  James  Arminius,  Nichok's  edition,  vol.  i,  p.  25. 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  75 

Not  always  does  the  mantle  of  the  sire  fall  fittingly  on 
the  shoulders  of  the  son,  but  the  two  greatest  preachers 
of  the  last  five  decades  were  sons  of  the  manse.  Spurgeon 
went  to  London  a  beardless  boy  of  nineteen  years  from  a 
home  proud  of  the  preaching  traditions  of  three  genera- 
tions. He  went  to  leave  in  its  busy  but  sad  life  deeper 
traces  of  his  personality  and  work  than  the  charioteers  of 
Pompeii  have  left  in  the  worn  pavement  of  the  streets  they 
once  enlivened  by  their  presence,  and  both  his  sons  are 
to-day  adorning  the  ministerial  profession  and  maintaining 
the  high  ancestral  reputation  for  ability  and  eloquence. 
And  no  one  who  has  read  the  Life  of  Dr.  Lyman  Beecher, 
by  his  son  Charles,  will  wonder  that,  from  a  hearthstone 
which  had  often  been  the  landing  place  of  mercies  because 
the  starting  place  of  prayer  and  lofty  purpose,  so  many 
preaching  Beechers  should  have  come — one  of  them  facile 
princeps  of  the  American  pulpit,  if  not  of  that  of  the  world, 
in  his  day. 

3.  The  Training  of  the  Schools. 

But  there  yet  remains  to  be  considered  the  training  of  the 
schools,  which 

I.  Must  adapt  itself  to  conditions  of  the  age. 

So  long  as  the  Christian  Church  aspires,  as  the  visible 
representative  of  the  "  Kingdom  of  God  "  on  earth,  to  uni- 
versal dominion  over  the  human  mind  she  must  qualify  her 
ministers  to  be  the  real,  if  not  the  acknowledged,  leaders 
and  teachers  of  their  times.  With  this  in  view  she  must 
not  hesitate  to  demand  from  them  conformity  to  the  highest 
known  standard  of  moral  and  spiritual  life  and  submission 
to  a  thorough  and  comprehensive  intellectual  discipline. 
The  vision  of  the  "watchman"  on  the  walls  of  Zion  needs 
to  be  clear,  strong,  and  sustained  to-day  to  a  degree  never 
required  before,  for  his  range  of  prospect  has  greatly  ex- 
panded during  the  eventful  century  now  drawing  to  a  close, 


76  Ecce  Clems 

and  problems — moral,  social,  intellectual,  industrial,  per- 
sonal, and  national — challenge  his  faculty  of  analysis  and 
discrimination  to-day,  of  which  the  men  of  a  generation 
or  two  ago  never  dreamed.  And  while  the  field  of  his  re- 
sponsibility has  widened,  some  of  the  resources  on  which  he 
might  have  safely  counted  in  the  past  are  hardly  to  be 
reckoned  on  now.  The  only  weapon  that  can  be  effectively 
used  in  the  warfare  of  our  time  is  that  finely  tempered 
sword  of  sanctified  Christian  culture — the  light  of  truth. 
Mere  acceptance  of  denominational  shibboleths  and  "  isms  " 
avails  no  more.  The  prestige  of  theological  systems  and 
the  dynasty  of  the  system-builders  as  such  have  ap- 
preciably declined.  The  decrees  of  ecclesiastical  councils 
are  no  more  than  mere  echoes  of  the  past — either  dead  or 
dying.  The  dawn  of  Christian  reason  is  with  us,  and  the 
era  of  authority  has  closed.  The  emancipation  of  indi- 
vidual judgment,  with  all  its  undoubted  perils,  is  already 
an  accomplished  fact.  The  present  century  has  canonized 
sober,  reverent,  labor-loving  criticism,  welcomed  its  presence 
in  our  halls  of  learning,  science,  and  historical  research,  and 
in  many  notable  instances  has  politely  asked  it  to  "  take  a 
chair" — and  stay.  Amid  the  growing  light  the  empire  of 
creeds  that  conclude  with  damnatory  clauses  is  being 
rapidly  dissolved.  Men  are  beginning  to  discern  the  deep 
meaning  of  the  Lord's  prophetic  word,  "  Ye  shall  know  the 
truth,  and  the  truth  shall  make  you  free,"  and  are  being 
attracted  by  the  force  and  beauty  of  his  prayer,  "  Sanctify 
them  through  thy  truth."  To-day  every  noble  thought 
finds  friends  and  every  real  power  is  welcomed.  Both  hands 
are  extended  to  hail  the  man  who  sees,  beyond  old  sunsets, 
the  light  of  a  new  dawn  for  mankind.  And  while  every- 
where the  yoke  oi false  authority  is  being  unceremoniously 
broken,  it  is  only  that  men  may  bend  their  necks  the  more 
willingly  to  the  true  dictation.  The  theological  school 
must,  therefore,  get  nearer  the  pulse  of  current  thought, 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  77 

mark  the  change  and  revise  its  curriculum ;  and,  adapting 
its  instructions  to  the  new  conditions,  make  men  who  shall 
be  competent  to  meet  the  reasonable  requirements  of  the 
age. 

2.  Mtist  not  be  fearful  of  science  or  jealous  of  man's  intel- 
lectual freedom. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  Christianity,  justly  interpreted,  is  not 
fearful  of  science,  jealous  of  man's  intellectual  freedom,  or 
anxious  to  fasten  padlocks  on  his  thoughts.  Its  funda- 
mental verities,  which  constitute  the  assured  anchorage  of 
faith,  grasp  firmly  the  rock  of  Eternal  Being,  and  are  con- 
firmed and  vindicated,  not  imperiled  or  obscured,  by  inquiry. 
There  are  music  and  majesty — both — in  the  words  of 
Hooker:  "  Dangerous  it  were  for  the  feeble  brain  of  man  to 
wade  far  into  the  doings  of  the  Almighty,  whom,  although  to 
know  be  life,  and  joy  to  make  mention  of  his  name,  yet  our 
soundest  knowledge  is  to  know  that  we  know  him  not  as 
indeed  he  is,  neither  can  know  him,  and  our  safest  eloquence 
concerning  him  is  our  silence  when  we  confess  without 
confession  that  his  glory  is  inexplicable,  his  greatness  above 
our  capacity  and  reach."*  But,  admitting  the  sublimity 
and  beauty  of  the  sentiment,  is  the  risk  against  which  we 
are  admonished  a  real  one  ?  Where  is  the  danger  of  wading 
too  far  into  the  doings  of  the  Almighty,  whether  in  the 
realm  of  science,  of  history,  of  philosophy,  or  theological 
thought  ?  Is  not  our  chief  peril  of  a  totally  opposite  kind  "i 
Is  not  that  research  urged  upon  us  as  the  very  pith  and 
marrow  of  our  strength  and  blessedness  ?  "  One  thing 
have  I  desired  of  the  Lord,  that  will  I  seek  after ;  that  I 
may  dwell  in  the  house  of  the  Lord  all  the  days  of  my  life, 
to  behold  the  beauty  of  the  Lord,  and  to  inquire  in  his 
temple."  Is  not  the  secret  of  the  Lord  with  them  that 
fear  him  ?  And  did  not  the  prophet  Amos,  while  depreca- 
ting  formalism    and    enslavement    to   ceremonial   routine, 

*  Laws  o/  Ecclesiastical  Polity,  book  i. 


78  Ecce  Clerus 

entreat  his  fellow-countrymen  to  "seek"  not  Bethel,  nor 
Gilgal,  nor  Beer-sheba,  but  to  "  seek  Jahveh  "  and  live  ? 
"Seek  him  that  maketh  the  seven  stars  and  Orion,  and 
turneth  the  shadow  of  death  into  the  morning,  and  maketh 
the  day  dark  with  night:  that  calleth  for  the  waters  of  the 
sea,  and  poureth  them  out  upon  the  face  of  the  earth: 
Jahveh  is  his  name."  Could  modern  science  and  philos- 
ophy covet  nobler  charter  than  this  ? 

Nothing,  in  truth,  so  stimulates  to  free,  wholesome, 
manly,  independent  thinking  as  the  great  truths  and  doc- 
trines of  revealed  religion,  and  nothing  offers  so  complete  a 
solution  of  all  the  great  problems  of  life  and  of  thought. 
And  to  the  few  men  who  have  followed  the  inward  light, 
and  wandered,  and  been  ostracized  and  persecuted,  in  their 
time,  for  their  deviation  from  the  narrow  sheep  track  of  so- 
called  orthodoxy,  the  world  owes  to-day  a  larger  debt  of 
gratitude  than  to  the  many  who,  forgetful  that  God  has 
still  "more  light  and  truth  to  break  forth  from  his  word," 
have  been  satisfied  with  what  they  inherited,  and  have 
quietly  stayed  at  home,  thus  incurring  the  reproach  of 
their  worthier  brethren :  Why  abode  ye  "  among  the  sheep- 
folds,  to  hear  the  bleatings  of  the  flocks  ? "  No  considera- 
tion avails  to  restrain  the  truth-loving  mind  from  seeking 
to  enrich  and  ennoble  faith  and  widen  the  skirts  of  light. 
The  most  thoroughly  trained  disciple  of  Palestinian  rabbin- 
ism  and  rising  hope  of  a  decadent  faith  suddenly  changed 
front,  when  new  conviction  came,  and  became  the  champion 
of  Christian  freedom  and  "  the  apostle  of  the  Gentiles." 
From  one  of  the  oldest  and  most  venerable  monastic  orders 
of  the  Catholic  Church  sprang  the  man  who  gave  Protes- 
tantism to  history.  The  most  promising  pupil  of  Dr.  Rey- 
nolds— the  zealous  exponent  and  advocate  of  Puritanism 
and  the  Presbyterian  polity,  in  Oxford,  in  the  latter  half  of 
the  sixteenth  century — was  Hooker,  whose  Ecclesiastical 
Polity  is  still  regarded  as  the  greatest  argument  for  an  epis- 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  79 

copalian  regime.  The  world  would  probably  never  have 
heard  of  Arminius  or  Arminianism  if  the  ardent  young 
theologue  of  Amsterdam  had  accepted  without  criticism  or 
question  the  Calvinism  of  Beza,  whose  lectures  on  the 
Epistle  to  the  Romans  he  attended  at  Geneva  and  greatly 
admired.  The  most  pronounced  and  most  distinguished 
High  Churchman  of  the  eighteenth  century  is  claimed  as 
the  founder  of  Methodism,  which  is  perhaps  the  most  anti- 
ritualistic  and  most  anti-sacerdotal  of  Protestant  denomina- 
tions. William  Ellery  Channing,  the  corypheus  of  New  Eng- 
land Unitarianism,  was  educated  as  a  Calvinist ;  and  for  a 
time  was  pastor  of  a  Calvinistic  church  in  Federal  Street, 
Boston,  Mass.  Cardinal  Newman  frankly  acknowledged 
his  indebtedness  for  the  beginnings  of  the  spiritual  life  to 
the  preaching  of  the  commentator  Thomas  Scott,  whose 
anti-Romish  sentiments  were  peculiarly  strong.*  The  most 
zealous  and  successful  propagandist  of  the  Roman  Catholic 
Church  in  England  since  the  era  of  the  Reformation  was 
the  late  Cardinal  Manning,  who  was  a  graduate  of  Oxford. 
And  Spurgeon,  though  he  never  would  acknowledge  his 
spiritual  paternity,  bowed  beneath  the  weight  of  religious 
conviction  under  a  sermon  preached  by  a  decided  Arminian, 
one  wet  Sunday  morning,  in  the  old  military  town  of  Col- 
chester, England. f  Religious  belief  is  neither  a  thing  of 
heredity  nor  the  creation  of  the  schools.  It  is  as  the  light- 
ning, which  "  Cometh  out  of  the  east  and  shineth  even 
unto  the  west"     In  this,  as  in  many  other  things, 

God  fulfills  himself  in  many  ways, 
Lest  one  good  custom  should  cornipt  the  world. 

Though  men  have  assumed  the  sanction  of  Christianity  for 
all  manner  of   narrowness,  shallowness,  and  bigotry,  it   is 

*  Apologia  Pro  Vita  Sua,  p.  56. 

+  The  Rev.  Robert  Eaglen,  the  man  who  preached  in  the  little  Primitive  Methodist 
church  on  the  day  young  Spurgeon  wandered  into  it  a  perfect  stranger  to  everyone, 
and  the  only  man  m  England  who  ever  claimed  to  be,  humanly  speaking,  the  means  of 
Spurgeon's  conversion,  was  personally  though  not  intimately  known  tp  the  author. 
He  was  a  man  of  frail  health  and  feeble  constitution,  and  was  early  obliged  to  retire 


80  Ecce  Clems 

noteworthy  that  it  is  within  the  Christian  literature,  and 
not  otherwhere,  that  the  noblest  exhortations  to  the  cultiva- 
tion of  intellectual  sanity,  sagacity,  breadth,  and  penetration 
— "  the  spirit  of  power,  and  of  We,  and  of  a  sound  mind  " — 
are  found.  "Be  ye  not  unwise,  but  understanding  what  the 
will  of  the  Lord  is ;  "  '*  Howbeit  in  malice  be  ye  children, 
but  in  good  sense  be  ye  full-grown  men  "  {riXeioc). 

It  is,  then,  not  only  agreeable  to  the  genius  of  Christianity, 
but  absolutely  required  by  the  condition  of  the  age,  that  the 
Christian  Church,  having  selected  the  candidates  for  its 
ministry  from  the  best  available  material,  should  seek  in  its 
university  and  seminary  instruction  to  preserve,  direct,  and 
develop  their  individuality  and  independence  of  thought 
with  a  view  to  their  adequate  equipment  for  the  keen  and 
interminable  conflict  with  the  prevailing  unbelief  and  apathy 
in  which  they  are  destined  to  be  engaged, 

r3.  Must  be  varied,  comprehensive,  and  thorough. 
Equally  needful  is  it  that  such  preparatory  drill  should 
be  as  varied  in  character  and  as  comprehensive  in  range 
'and  scope  as  possible,  so  as  to  impart  to  the  student  "  the 
versatility  of  intellect,  the  command  over  his  own  powers, 
the  instinctive  just  estimate  of  things  as  they  pass  before 
him,  which  sometimes,  indeed,  is  a  natural  gift,  but  com- 
monly is  not  gained  without  much  effort  and  the  exercise 
jof  years,"*  It  is  safe  to  say  that  nowhere  has  a  thoroughly 
disciplined  and  well-balanced  judgment  a  greater  value  or 
a  larger  opportunity  than  in  the  ministerial  profession,  and 
nowhere  is  the  conspicuous  want  of  it  attended  with  more 
disastrous  results.  By  judgment,  however,  we  do  not  mean 
merely  that  familiar  and  homely  quality  of  mind  which 

from  active  service.  He  was  characterized  by  a  singular  devoutness  of  spirit,  deep 
theological  convictions,  great  simplicity  of  character,  and  an  unassuming  manner.  He 
once  contrived  to  meet  Mr.  Spurgeon,  .nnd  endeavored  by  a  full  and  detailed  descrip- 
tion of  the  church,  congregation,  and  other  attendant  circumstances  to_  bring  his 
convert  to  an  acknowledgment  of  him  as  the  agent  in  God's  hands  of  opening  to  him 
"  the  door  of  faith,"  but  though  Spurgeon  admitted  the  accuracy  of  his  account,  he  per- 
emptorily refused  to  recognize  him  as  the  preacher  of  the  occasion. 
*  Cardinal  Newman's  Idea  o/a  University,  p.  174. 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  81 

withholds  a  person  from  the  commission  of  mistakes  to  the 
injury  of  his  fortunes  or  his  reputation,  but  "  that  master- 
principle  of  business,  literature,  talent,  which  gives  him 
strength  in  any  subject  he  chooses  to  grapple  with,  and 
enables  him  to  seize  the  strong  point  in  it."*  The  great 
leaders,  teachers,  and  orators  of  the  Christian  Church  have 
all  been  willing  to  purchase  this  inestimable  gift  at  the  cost 
of  years  of  varied  and  unremitting  mental  toil  and  applica- 
tion. In  their  view,  versatility — an  immense  advantage  in 
any  profession — was  entitled  to  take  rank  among  the  car- 
dinal virtues  in  a  minister  of  Christ,  inasmuch  as  it  seemed 
to  realize  the  divine  ministerial  ideal — "wise  as  serpents, 
and  harmless  as  doves."  It  was  to  this  many-sided  intel- 
lectual development  the  apostle  of  the  Gentiles  owed  the 
facility  and  freedom  with  which  he  became  "  all  things  to 
all  men  "  that  he  "  might  by  all  means  save  some."  Whether 
he  addresses  his  own  infuriated  fellow-countrymen,  in  their 
vernacular  Syriac,  from  the  steps  of  the  Tower  of  Antonia, 
in  Jerusalem,  or  quotes  to  fastidious  Athenians  on  Mars' 
Hill  lines  pregnant  with  Christian  truths  from  their  own 
approved  poets,  or  expounds  to  the  Greek-speaking  Jews  of 
the  Dispersion  (bi  'EXXrjvigTdt)  in  Rome  the  divine  truths 
available  to  them  in  the  Septuagint  Scriptures,  or  seeks  to 
kindle  the  spark  of  faith  in  the  minds  of  the  fickle  Gala- 
tians,  or  pleads  for  an  exclusive  loyalty  to  God  among  the 
more  enlightened  and  reliable  men  of  the  Asian  metropolis 
— the  home  of  the  great  goddess  Diana — his  various  knowl- 
edge and  versatile  gift  of  speech  are  a  never-failing  re- 
source, everywhere  securing  respectful  attention  to  the 
truths  he  wishes  to  declare.  It  was  an  immense  advantage 
to  early  Christianity  that  its  great  apologists,  Justin  Martyr, 
Origen,  Clemens  Alexandrinus,  Athanasius,  were  as  famil- 
iar with  Greek  philosophy  as  their  opponents.  Augustine's 
thorough  acquaintance  with  Plato's  subtle  and  sublime  rea- 

*  Idea  of  a  University^  p.  174. 

6 


82  Ecce  Clerus 

sonings  was  no  small  part  of  his  fitness  for  the  place  he  has 
filled  in  the  history  of  Western  religious  thought.  Chrys- 
ostom  and  Basil  both  studied  Roman  law,  thus  setting  an 
example  followed  by  many  of  the  most  eminent  of  the  Latin 
fathers.  No  de'  Medici  that  ever  walked  the  streets  of 
Florence  was  the  equal  of  Savonarola  even  as  a  statesman. 
Wyclif  was  scarcely  more  skillful  in  translating  and  inter- 
preting the  word  of  God  than  in  the  art  of  negotiation  and 
diplomacy.  Melanchthon  was  an  expert  in  law,  medicine, 
and  philosophy,  and  lectured  to  the  youths  of  Germany  and 
the  adjacent  countries  on  the  poetry  of  Homer  and  the 
epistles  of  St.  Paul  in  the  same  course,  making  the  former 
contribute  to  the  elucidation  of  the  latter,  and  seeking,  like 
Solomon,  "Tyrian  brass  and  gems  for  the  adornment  of 
God's  temple."  Calvin  and  Beza  both  attained  distinction 
as  students  of  jurisprudence  in  the  University  of  Orleans, 
as  Luther  had  done  before  them  at  Erfurth.  Hooker's  as- 
sociation with  the  benchers  of  the  Inns  of  Court,  as  Master 
of  the  Temple,  brought  many  sharp  thorns  to  his  pillow, 
and  occasioned  him  great  mental  disquietude,  but  its  value 
was  simply  incalculable  in  preparing  him  to  write  the  great- 
est treatise  on  law  known  to  the  English  tongue.  Bunyan's 
brief  boyish  experience  among  the  heroes  of  Fairfax's  army 
was  no  small  part  of  the  moral  and  intellectual  preparation 
which  enabled  him  to  describe  the  exalted  character  of 
"Greatheart,"  and  without  his  personal  participation  in 
the  siege  of  Leicester  we  could  hardly  have  had  the  stir- 
ring scenes  of  the  siege  of  Mansoul  in  the  Holy  War. 
William  Carey  was  equally  at  home  on  the  cobbler's  stool, 
in  the  pulpit,  and  in  the  professor's  chair.  Charles  G. 
Finney's  training  as  a  lawyer  not  only  gave  him  an  in- 
fluence over  the  legal  mind  no  one  else  ever  possessed,  but 
contributed  no  small  element  of  his  power  as  a  preacher  of 
the   Gospel.*      Isaac   Barrow  was   none   the  less  a  distin- 

*  Speaking  of  Finney's  evangelistic  labors  in  Rochester,  N.  Y.,  his  biographer.  Dr. 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  83 

guished  pulpit  orator  because  he  was  the  leading  mathema- 
tician of  his  age  and  preceptor  of  Isaac  Newton — the 
greatest  mathematical  genius  known  to  history.  The  fame 
of  Thomas  Chalmers  as  a  preacher  began  with  the  publi- 
cation of  his  "  Astronomical  Discourses  " — a  not  surpris- 
ing fact  when  it  is  remembered  that  his  first  love  as  a  stu- 
dent was  not  evangelical  theology,  but  the  exactest  of  the 
sciences. 

The  minister's  education  is  only  adequate  when  it  en- 
ables him  not  only  to  be  in  sympathy  with  all  the  domi- 
nant educational,  scientific,  and  literary  interests  of  his  time, 
but  also  with  all  the  main  departments  of  art  and  handicraft 
and  professional  activity.  Such  only  is  the  mental  discipline 
which  is  fitted  to  give  a  man,  in  the  words  of  one  eminent 
alike  as  a  preacher,  author,  educator,  and  ecclesiastic,  "a 
clear,  conscious  view  of  his  own  opinions  and  judgments,  a 
truth  in  developing  them,  an  eloquence  in  expressing  them, 
and  a  force  in  urging  them.  It  teaches  him  to  see  things 
as  they  are,  to  go  right  to  the  point,  to  disentangle  a  skein 
of  thought,  to  detect  what  is  sophistical,  and  to  discard  what 
is  irrelevant.  It  prepares  him  to  fill  any  post  with  credit 
and  to  master  any  subject  with  facility.  It  shows  him  how 
to  accommodate  himself  to  others,  how  to  throw  himself 
into  their  state  of  mind,  how  to  bring  before  them  his  own, 
how  to  influence  them,  how  to  come  to  an  understanding 
with  them,  how  to  bear  with  them.  He  is  at  home  in  any 
society,  he  has  common  ground  with  every  class ;  he  knows 
when  to  speak  and  when  to  be  silent;  he  is  able  to  converse, 
he  is  able  to  listen  ;  he  can  ask  a  question  pertinently  and 
gain  a  lesson  seasonably  when  he  has  nothing  to  impart 
himself;  he  is  ever  ready,  yet  never  in  the  way;  he  is  a 

Wright,  says :  "  Finney's  audiences  were  composed  of  the  most  intelligent  portions  of 
the  people,  including  the  lawyers,  who  invited  him  almost  in  a  body.  As  he  proceeded 
from  night  to  night  with  his  lectures,  addressed  especially  to  them,  the  interest  increased 
and  finally  culminated,  without  any  call  on  Finney's  part,  in  a  spontaneous  movement, 
in  which  the  lawyers,  almost  en  masse,  arose  one  evening  and  expressed  their  deter- 
mination henceforth  to  live  Christian  lives  and  to  acknowledge  God  before  the  world." 
— Li/e  0/ Finney,  p.  102. 


84  Ecce  Clerus 

pleasant  companion  and  a  comrade  you  can  depend  upon; 
he  knows  when  to  be  serious  and  when  to  trifle,  and  he  has 
a  sure  tact  which  enables  him  to  trifle  with  gracefulness  and 
to  be  serious  with  eff"ect.  He  has  the  repose  of  a  mind 
which  lives  in  itself  while  it  lives  in  the  world,  and  which 
has  resources  for  its  happiness  at  home  when  it  cannot  go 
abroad.  He  has  a  gift  which  serves  him  in  public  and  sup- 
ports him  in  retirement,  without  which  good  fortune  is  but 
vulgar,  and  with  which  failure  and  disappointment  have  a 
charm.  The  art  which  tends  to  make  a  man  all  this  is  in 
the  object  which  it  pursues  as  useful  as  the  art  of  wealth  or 
the  art  of  health,  though  it  is  less  susceptible  of  method 
and  less  tangible,  less  certain,  less  complete  in  its  result."* 

4.  Hence  fitted  to  impart  the  secret  of  power  required  by  the 
times. 

Not  for  its  own  sake,  however,  is  the  comprehensive  and 
complete  development  of  the  preacher's  moral  and  intellec- 
tual personality  to  be  sought,  but  for  the  sake  of  the  greatly 
augmented  power  for  service  which  it  imparts.  Standing 
as  we  do  in  the  early  dawn  of  an  epoch  when  all  authority, 
power,  predominance,  leadership,  come  only  by  manhood,  by 
capacity,  by  broad  intelligence  and  intense  moral  insight,  by 
close  conformity  to  the  mind  of  Christ,  this  is  an  important 
consideration.  This  century,  now  old  with  many  sorrows 
and  labors,  and  unique  in  the  number  and  character  of  its 
triumphs  and  achievements,  is  mainly  distinguished  for  its 
having  seen  the  inauguration  and  acknowledgment  of  the 
empire  of  moral  ideas.  For  some  little  time  longer,  prob- 
ably, mankind  will  consent  to  be  plagued  in  religion,  as  in 
politics  and  social  life,  with  the  man  of  superficial  smart- 
ness, the  master  of  tact  and  diplomacy,  but  there  are  un- 
mistakable signs  of  the  cultivation  of  a  keener  popular  judg- 
ment and  discrimination.  Even  where  the  crudities  of  the 
charlatan  and  the  legerdemain  of  the  empiricist  linger  the 

♦  Newman's  Idea  of  a  University,  p.  176. 


The  Minister  in  the  Making  85 

longest  men  of  light  are  becoming  more  and  more  the  men 
of  leading.  With  the  force  of  an  indisputable  moral  axiom 
the  truth  commends  itself  to  men  that  a  clear  and  compre- 
hensive spiritual  insight  is  the  only  sure  basis  of  authority 
and  power;  that  he  alone  who  knows  how  to  serve  his 
fellow-men  with  "  thoughts  that  breathe  and  words  that 
burn  "  can  have  any  just  claim  or  real  competency  to  rule 
them.  Ultimately  the  world  will  consent  to  be  governed  only 
by  divinely  inspired  ideals,  and  he  who  gives  men  these  will 
have  no  need  of  crozier,  crown,  tiara,  sword,  or  scepter — the 
baubles  of  a  barbarous  bygone  time — to  assert  or  symbolize 
his  power.  Like  the  ideal  theocratic  ruler,  he  will  govern 
his  sheep  by  feeding  them;  he  will  be  the  watcher  of  his 
own  fold — not  leave  it  to  an  hireling.  "  He  will  feed  his  V 
flock  like  a  shepherd."  ^ 


86  Ecce  Clerus 


CHAPTER  IV 

The  drdinal  Fanction  and  Leading  Requisites  of  the 
Christian  Minister 

Johannes  was  iu  the  waste,  washing  and  preaching  the  washing  of  amends- 
deeds  on  sin's  forgiveness.  And  to  him  went  forth  all  the  Judeisc  realm  and 
all  the  Hierusalem-men  and  were  by  him  washed  in  Jordan's  flood,  naming 
their  sins.  And  Johannes  was  clad  with  camel's  hair  and  a  felt  girdle  was 
round  his  loins ;  and  he  ate  grass-steppers  and  wood-honey.  And  he  preached, 
and  said,  "  A  stranger  cometh  after  me  of  whom  I  am  not  worthy  that  I,  bow- 
ing down,  should  unknit  his  shoon's  thong.  I  wash  you  in  water !  he  washeth 
you  in  Holy  Ghost." —  WycUf,  "The  Good-News  after  Marcus's  Telling." 

He  should  employ  himself,  as  the  one  business  of  his  discourse,  to  bring 
home  to  others  and  to  leave  deep  within  them  what  he  has  before  he  began  to 
speak  to  them  brought  home  to  himself.  What  he  feels  himself  and  feels 
deeply  he  has  to  make  others  feel  deeply ;  and  in  proportion  as  he  compre- 
hends this  he  will  rise  above  the  temptation  of  introducing  collateral  matters, 
and  will  have  no  taste,  no  heart,  for  going  aside  after  flowers  of  oratory,  fine 
figures,  tuneful  periods,  which  are  worth  nothing  unless  they  come  to  him 
spontaneously  and  are  spoken  "out  of  the  abundance  of  the  'hta.r\.."—Jokn 
Henry  Cardinal  Newman. 

Prcedicatorem  esse  ministrum  Dei  per  quern  verbum  Dei  a  spiritus  fonte 
ducitur  ad fidelium  anitnas  irrigendas. — St.  Charles. 

J.  Proclaiming  the  EvangcL 

From  the  moment  of  the  first  appearance  of  the  Baptizer 
in  the  Judean  wilderness  one  set  of  terms  of  clear  and  deci- 
sive import  is  constantly  employed  to  express  the  cardinal 
idea  and  leading  function  of  the  evangelical  ministry.  These 
words  not  only  have  a  well-defined  and  familiar  signification, 
but  are  almost  ubiquitous  in  their  range  and  scope.  They 
are  used  by  all  the  principal  writers  of  the  New  Testament, 
with  one  remarkable  exception.  And  even  their  conspicu- 
ous absence  from  the  fourth  gospel  and  from  the  epistles 
and  Apocalypse  of  St.  John  only  adds  emphasis  to  the 
frequency  with  which  they  occur  in  the  Synoptic  gospels, 


The  Cardinal  Function  87 

in   the  Acts,  and   in   the   epistles  of  St.   Peter   and   St. 
Paul* 

Christianity  in  its  inception,  and  for  perhaps  the  first 
twenty-five  or  thirty  years  of  its  existence,  was  nothing 
more  than  a  simple  oral  proclamation  (/cT^pvy/za),  whose  sub- 
ject-matter was  a  peace-imparting  evangel  {evayyikiov) — an 
item  of  gracious  tidings,  forecasting  and  hastening  the  uni- 
versal reign  of  heaven  (^  I3aai?.eca  ribv  ovpavti)v)  upon  earth. 
And  the  function  of  the  proclaim er  (K7ypu|)  was  evidently 
intended  to  be  the  primary  and  essential,  though  not  ex- 
clusive, feature  of  the  new  economy  to  the  end  of  time. 
Statesman,  prince,  philosopher,  rhetorician,  and  poet  in 
pagan  lands ;  lawgiver,  priest,  prophet,  and  ruler  among  the 
chosen  people,  had  each  had  his  day ;  now  had  dawned  the 
hour  of  the  Christian  herald — the  dispensation  of  the  evangel 
of  human  redemption.  In  this  evangel  lay  the  power  of  God 
for  the  salvation  of  those  who  believe.  Of  course,  like  all  the 
nobler  institutions  of  history,  the  office  of  the  Christian  Ceryx 
has  seriously  suffered  from  perversion  and  neglect.  For 
centuries  together  its  very  idea  has  been  almost  lost,  with 
consequences  the  most  disastrous  to  the  moral  and  spiritual 
welfare  of  mankind,  but  the  words  invariably  used  in  the 
evangelic  and  apostolic  records  clearly  indicate  what  was  its 
original  form  and  was  meant  to  be  its  continuous  and  abid- 
ing character.  The  office,  under  various  names,  was  one  of 
eminence  and  honor  in  all  Eastern  and  classic  lands.  The 
dignity  and  authority  of  its  occupant  arose  from  his  repre- 
sentative character  and  the  power  that  lay  behind  him.  He 
spoke  the  mind  and  declared  the  purpose  of  kings,  courts, 
senates ;  and  princes  and  their  powerful  armies  paid  atten- 
tion to  his  word  ;  as  when  the  Roman  legate  C.  Popilius 
Lsenas,  the  herald  of  the  Senate,  met  the  army  of  Antiochus 
Epiphanes  in  the  Egyptian  desert,  in  sight  of  Alexandria, 
and  making  a  circle  in  the  sand  with  his  staff  around  the 

*  S«e  Appendix  to  chap.  iv. 


88  Ecce  Clerus 

haughty  scion  of  the  Seleucidse,  who  sought  to  stave  off  his 
demand  by  an  evasive  answer,  declared  that  to  step  beyond 
that  line  before  a  satisfactory  reply  had  been  given  would 
be  to  incur  the  wrath  of  the  Roman  people. 

2.  Christ  the  Prince  of  Heralds. 

It  is  hardly  matter  for  marvel  that  the  Christian  Church, 
which  ultimately  consented  to  receive  as  its  distinctive 
designation  a  name  originally  imposed  by  the  satirical  wits 
of  a  depraved  Syrian  city,  hesitated  just  as  little  to  borrow 
some  of  the  most  prominent  features  of  its  administrative 
machinery  and  some  of  the  most  honored  of  its  official  titles 
from  the  civil  governments  under  which  it  grew.*  In  the 
present  instance  it  found  in  the  office  of  the  Ceryx  an  insti- 
tution adapted  for  its  purpose  ready  to  hand,  and  adopted 
it  with  no  further  modification  than  that  of  devoting  it  to 
the  nobler  function  of  proclaiming  everywhere  in  the  name 
of  heaven,  "  Peace  on  earth  among  men  of  good  disposition." 
Correctly  and  comprehensively  defined,  the  Christian  evan- 
gel is  Christ.  It  is  the  transcript  of  his  nature,  the  product 
of  his  mind,  the  outcome  of  his  acts  and  doctrines  and  life 
and  death  combined  ;  and  its  one  grand  object  is  to  secure 
the  fulfillment  of  his  purpose  in  the  salvation  of  mankind. 
Christ  is  the  proclamation  and  proclaimer — both — of  the 
"kingdom  of  God."  He  is  "the  Faithful  and  True  Wit- 
ness "  of  everlasting  facts  and  truths — "  the  beginning 
(t\  apxv)  of  the  creation  of  God.f  He  is  born  to  be  King  of 
Truth  and  of  true  souls,  and  to  demonstrate  truth's 
illumining  and  liberating  power.  He  is  Master  {enLardrrjg) , 
Teacher  {SiddoKaXog),  Leader  {Ka  67]y7)r7Jg),  Lord  (olKodeaTTo- 
Tijg)y  Healer  (mrpdf),  Saviour  (Swr^p),  Ruler  (Kvpiog),  and 
Shepherd  {noifii^v)  of  his  people.     He  is  the  outshining  of 

^*Vide  "Hatch's  Or^anizai/on  of  the  Early  Christian  Churches,  lectures  ii  and 
iii ;  also  Bishop  Lightfoot's  Epistles  of  St.  Paul  (Philippians),  p.  95. 
t  Rev.  iii,  14, 


The  Cardinal  Function  89 

God's  glory  {dnavyaaiia  rrig  do^rig)  and  the  perfect  impress 
of  his  substance  {xapaKrijp  r^f  vnoaTdoEcjg)*  He  is  the 
Firstborn  {ngoroTOKog)  of  the  physical  and  moral  universe, 
the  Creator  and  Consummator  of  the  ages.f  He  is  the  Apostle 
and  High  Priest  of  his  people,|  and  the  Paschal  Lamb 
(6  diivoc:),  slain  from  the  foundation  of  the  world  for  their 
sin  and  their  salvation.  §  He  is  the  Captain  of  deliverance  to 
believers,!  the  Arbiter  of  destiny  to  all  men,  holding  in  his 
power  the  keys  of  Hades  and  Death.^  He  is  the  Living 
One,**  and  the  Dispenser  of  life,f f  having  a  name  that  is 
above  every  name,JJ  and  inheriting  the  endless  worship  of 
men  and  angels.  For  "  when  he  again  shall  have  brought 
in  the  firstborn  into  the  world  {dg  rrjv  olKovnivTjv)  he  saith. 
And  let  all  the  angels  of  God  worship  him.§§ 

All  this  he  is,  and  more.  But  he  is  first  and  last  and 
chiefly  the  herald  of  eternal  things — of  God,  his  love,  his 
Fatherhood,  and  coming  universal  reign.  Hints  and 
glimpses  of  all  this  there  had  been  before,  but  greatly  ob- 
scured by  partial  and  imperfect  presentation.  Jesus  purged 
the  gold  from  all  alloy,  restamped  it  with  his  own  image  and 
superscription,  and  made  it  current  coin.  He  spoke  the 
universal  language  of  the  soul,  and  men  knew  his  voice. 
"  The  sources  of  religion  lie  hid  from  us,"  says  a  great  au- 
thority in  jurisprudence. II II  "  All  that  we  know  is  that  now 
and  again  in  the  course  of  ages  some  one  sets  to  music  the 
tune  which  is  haunting  millions  of  ears.  It  is  caught  up 
here  and  there,  and  repeated,  till  the  chorus  is  thundered 
out  by  a  body  of  singers  able  to  drown  all  discords  and  to 
force  the  unmusical  mass  to  listen  to  them."  "  I  follow 
Christ,"  says  another,  with  equal  force  and  beauty,  "  because 
I  have  heard  him  speak  a  natural  language,  and  because  I 
have  heard  beating  in  his  heart  the  heart  of  all.     Therefore 

*  Heb.  i,  3.                            +  Col.  i,  15;  Rom.  viii,  29.  t  Heb.  iii,  i. 

§  Rev.  xiii,  8.                        II  Heb.  ii,  10.  5  Rev.  i,  18. 

♦*  Rev.  i.  18.                        t+  John  x,  28.             **  Phil,  i!,  9.  §§  Heb.  i,  6. 
Ill  Sir  James  Fitzjames  Stephen's  Liberty,  Equality^  Fraternity. 


90  Ecce  Clerus 

he  is  not  for  me  a  person  who  was  and  is  no  more,  but  the 
eternal  contemporary  of  us  all,  the  symbol  of  a  spirit  which 
rests  with  us  always.  The  visible  truths  of  the  human  and 
divine  Evangel  rise  every  morning,  on  my  horizon,  like  new 
luminaries.  I  salute  and  adore  them  with  the  same  admira- 
tion as  if  I  were  seeing  them  for  the  first  time.  Miracles, 
dogmas,  strangeness  of  forms,  which  worried  me  at  first, 
worry  me  no  longer.  Across  them  all  I  see  only  one  thing 
— '  Man  in  search  of  God,  God  in  search  of  man.'  "  Thus 
has  the  great  Proclaimer  awakened  and  elicited  the  latent 
divinity  that  lay  paralyzed  and  dumb  in  human  souls. 

3*  Manhood  is  Requisite* 

And  as  the  Prince  of  heralds  was  his  own  proclamation — 
himself  the  Door  by  which  men  were  to  enter  the  fold — 
himself  the  Bread  of  heaven  in  the  strength  of  which  they 
were  to  live,  so  those  whom  he  now  summons  to  proclaim  his 
message  to  the  world  must  themselves  be  the  noblest  moral 
product  of  their  age  and  the  best  part  of  the  message  they 
endeavor  to  declare.  It  is  not  abstract  but  concrete  truth 
that  tells.  The  real  power  of  any  argument  is  not  simply 
fidelity  to  facts  and  to  logical  formula,  but  the  force  and 
fire  of  the  soul  that  forges  the  links  of  the  chain.  It  is  not 
so  much  the  sermon  as  the  man  behind  the  sermon  that  con- 
stitutes the  true  dynamic  of  the  pulpit.  Not  for  science,  or 
philosophy,  or  theological  dogma,  nor  yet  for  the  products 
of  art,  the  triumphs  of  eloquence,  the  marvels  of  inventive 
genius,  or  the  lore  of  scholarly  study  and  research,  is  the 
world's  hunger  keenest  and  most  constant,  but  for  manhood 
and  womanhood.  More  of  the  former  it  never  had  than  it 
has  to-day,  and  yet  its  heart  was  never  hungrier,  more  fever- 
ish, more  restless,  than  it  is  now.  The  vision  for  which 
"  the  whole  creation  groaneth  and  travaileth  in  pain  together 
until  now  "  is  the  lingering  advent  and  apocalypse  of  a  re- 
deemed and  ideal  humanity.    As  a  recent  writer  has  forcibly 


The  Cardinal  Function  91 

observed,  "All  arts,  inventions,  philanthropies,  religions,  are 
but  tentaculcB  put  forth  searching  for  the  means  to  make  the 
man  of  the  future,  who  shall  be  what  all  who  have  the  vision 
and  faculty  divine  have  always  prophesied  he  would  yet  be 
— a  microcosm,  the  mirror  of  the  universe.  We,  in  our  lit- 
tle corner,  doing  our  work  well-nigh  unnoted  by  the  world 
at  large,  are  helping  by  our  small  increments  of  power  to 
create  this  complete  human  being — the  goal  of  all  desire 
and  hope.  The  coral  zoophyte  builds  not  more  surely  on 
the  unseen  reef  that  which  yet  shall  rise  in  gleaming  beauty 
above  the  deep  sea's  level  blue  than  we  are  building  for 
universal  and  perfected  human  nature.  Nothing  less  is  in 
our  thought,  and  nothing  else ;  for  by  ideals  we  live,  and 
this  ideal  has  been  upon  our  consciousness  from  the  begin- 
ning." In  everything  fidelity  to  the  ideal  is  the  one  grand 
secret  of  effectiveness.  Milton  contemplating  the  composi- 
tion of  his  great  epic,  the  Paradise  Lost,  has  told  us  how  this 
conviction  awed  him.  "  He  who  would  be  a  true  poet,"  he 
says  in  his  Apology  for  Smectymnuus,  **  or  who  would  speak 
in  laudable  things,  ought  himself  to  be  a  true  poem — that 
is,  a  composition  and  pattern  of  the  best  and  most  honor- 
able ;  not  presuming  to  sing  high  praises  of  what  is  worthy 
unless  he  have  in  himself  the  experience,  and  the  practice, 
and  all  that  is  praiseworthy."  No  preacher  can  proclaim 
higher  things  than  he  knows,  or  present  a  mightier  and  more 
exalted  Christ  than  has  been  realized  in  his  own  experience 
and  embodied  in  his  own  personality.  Unless  constantly 
sustained  and  inspired  by  the  Perfect  Ideal,  his  theme  will 
ever  be  beyond  his  grasp,  and  discerning  persons  will  see 
the  hopeless  struggle  after  the  unattained  and  unattainable 
with  pain  and  pity.  It  is  the  Shekinah  that  makes  the 
temple  a  holy  place,  and  in  the  experience  of  the  preacher, 
as  in  that  of  Christ  himself,  there  must  be  an  incarnation 
before  there  can  be  an  exaltation.  Assuming  that  as  the 
soul  of  the  preacher  is  so  will  the  soul  of  his  sermon  be,  the 


92  Ecce  Clerus 

Church  is  justified  in  insisting  that  men  of  small  moral 
stature  are  no  more  competent  to  preach  than  an  African 
bushranger  is  competent  to  interpret  the  music  of  Handel, 
Beethoven,  or  Wagner.  "  Such  preachers,"  says  a  master 
of  the  craft,  "  show  their  hearers  a  dingy  ceiling  instead  of 
an  open  sky ;  make  them  paddle  on  a  pond  when  they 
might  be  scudding  across  an  ocean.  They  are  retail  huck- 
sters of  the  higgling  class.  They  dispense  the  little  truth 
they  are  capable  of  assimilating  in  small  packets,  tied  with 
feeble  thread,  and  stamped  with  the  impress  of  their  own 
Lilliputian  qualities.  It  is  these  exiguous,  pettifogging  deal- 
ers in  sacred  things  that  have  helped  so  much  to  produce 
for  us  the  small  God,  the  small  Bible,  the  small  life,  the 
small  past  and  present  and  future,  that  in  many  religious 
circles  one  can  hardly  move  without  treading  upon  some- 
thing. On  the  other  hand,  the  sermon  of  a  man  of  finely 
statured  qualities,  a  man  of  height  and  breadth,  a  man  of 
magnitude  and  magnanimity,  a  man  whose  soul  is  a  conti- 
nent and  not  the  churchyard  of  a  country  parish,  will  as  in- 
evitably partake  of  his  greatness  as  in  the  ancierit  mythologies 
the  children  of  the  gods  inherited  the  divinity  of  their  parents. " 
The  public  proclamation,  in  the  person  of  the  proclaimer 
himself,  of  a  richer  and  nobler  manhood  constituted  and 
conserved  by  the  abiding  fullness  {nXripoifia)  of  the  Spirit 
would  insure  the  perpetual  recurrence  of  the  Pentecost; 
thus  fulfilling  the  intention  of  Christ,  inducing  a  widespread, 
radical,  and  thorough  repentance  (jierdvoia) ,  or  change  of 
mind,  and  meeting  the  one  obvious  and  crying  need  of  the 
age.  "  I  expect,"  says  the  author  of  the  Tongue  of  Fire, 
"  to  see  cities  swept  from  end  to  end,  their  manners  ele- 
vated, their  commerce  purified,  their  politics  Christianized, 
their  criminal  population  reformed,  their  poor  made  to  feel 
that  they  dwell  amongst  brethren — righteousness  in  the 
streets,  peace  in  the  homes,  an  altar  at  every  fireside — be- 
cause I  believe  in  the  Holy  Ghost." 


The  Cardinal  Function  93 

4*  Conviction  is  Indispensable. 

Nor  is  it  difficult  to  explain  the  source  (humanly  speak- 
ing) of  this  power  of  consecrated  spiritual  manhood  in  the 
ministry  ;  for  the  essential  element  in  all  noble  personality 
is  conviction,  and  conviction  is  commanding  and  contagious. 
The  really  great  souls  of  the  world  have  been  the  great  be- 
lievers of  the  world.  And  this  is  true  whether  the  believer 
be  a  Syrian  like  the  reformed  polytheist  Abraham,  a  Hebrew 
like  the  sublime  Jahvist,  Moses;  an  Arabian  like  Moham- 
med, a  Hindu  like  Sakya  Mtini,  the  Buddha;  an  Iranian 
like  the  noble  Zarathustra,  the  founder  of  the  Perso- 
Iranian  national  religion ;  a  Chinaman  like  Kong-fu-tse,  or 
a  Jew  like  the  founder  of  the  one  absolute  eternal,  all-con- 
quering religion,  Jesus  of  Nazareth.  Everywhere  and  in 
all  time  the  word  that  stirs  men,  influencing  their  judgments 
and  supplying  sufficient  motive  power  to  their  wills,  is  the 
speech  of  the  man  who  says,  *'  I  believe,  and  therefore  have 
I  spoken."  Men  do  not  find  fault  with  dogma  if  it  be  a  true 
doKei  not  * — a  living  personal  conviction.  They  only  object 
to  it  when  it  is  dead,  as  they  would  object  to  any  other  un- 
buried  corpse.  Even  a  hard  and  cold  skepticism  is  over- 
awed and  carried  captive  by  the  eloquence  and  majesty  of 
faith.  The  philosophical  deist  Bolingbroke  and  the  suave  but 
insincere  Chesterfield  were  charmed  with  the  whole-souled 
appeals  of  George  Whitefield.  The  most  honest  and  ablest 
of  present-day  secularists,  George  Jacob  Holyoake,  makes 
no  secret  of  his  liking  for  the  preaching,  to  which  he  occa- 
sionally listens,  of  the  distinguished  English  Methodist, 
Hugh  Price  Hughes.  "  I  have  listened  to  Mr.  Spurgeon," 
says  that  cultured  Unitarian,  Moncure  Conway,  "  and  borne 
away  an  impression  that  strong  men  may  be  unconscious  of 
the  genius  that  o'ermasters  them.  I  heard  him  preach  on 
the  text,  'Lead  us  not  into  temptation.'     Now,  thought  I, 

*  The  word  dogma  simply  means  personal  opinion  earnestly  held,  being  probably 
derived  from  the  common  Greek  phrase  66ku  fioi — "it  seems  to  me." 


94  Ecce  Clerus 

we  shall  hear  a  good,  old-fashioned  account  of  election  and 
reprobation  and  a  clear  exposition  of  the  mystery  of  iniquity. 
Nothing  of  the  kind,  or  at  least  very  little  of  the  kind ;  a 
small  theologic  *  grace  before  meat,'  preceded  a  sermon 
full  of  pathos  and  power,  dealing  with  the  actual  trials  and 
temptations  of  this  great  city.  We  saw  the  poor  youth  in 
many  a  strait,  striving  to  conquer  the  seductions  of  evil ;  we 
saw  the  thin,  shivering  seamstress  going  to  her  comfortless 
home  with  the  pittance  gained  by  her  weary  toil,  as  the 
finery  of  vice  flaunts  by  her  and  the  tempter  whispers  in 
her  ear.  It  was  vivid  as  a  scene  from  *  Faust ; '  it  started 
tears  to  the  eyes,  and  I  soon  perceived  that  when  that  ser- 
mon was  prepared  Calvin  was  bowed  into  a  corner,  and  the 
stern  face  of  London  held  the  preacher  with  its  glittering 
eye." 

It  was  an  overmastering  sense  of  the  truth  he  proclaimed 
that  explains  the  power  of  the  Baptizer  over  the  degraded  Idu- 
mean  prince  who  "  did  many  things  and  heard  him  gladly  ;  " 
of  a  Chrysostom  confronting  the  heresy  and  heathenism  of 
Antioch,  or  the  self-conceited  sophists  of  Byzantium ;  of  an 
Ambrose  humbling  the  imperious  but  guilty  spirit  of  Theo- 
dosius,  against  whom,  stained  with  the  blood  of  thousands 
of  massacred  men,  women,  and  children,  he  closed  the  door 
of  the  church  at  Milan  until  his  crime  was  atoned  for  by  a 
genuine  repentance  ;  of  a  Leo  arresting  the  menacing  ad- 
vance of  the  barbarian  Attila  ;  of  a  St.  Bernard  over  popes 
like  Honorius  II,  Innocent  II,  and  Eugenius  III,  and  princes 
like  Lothaire,  and  brilliant  philosophic  heretics  like  Abelard, 
and  crowded  councils  like  that  of  Sens  and  that  of  Vezelay;  of 
a  Savonarola  demanding  at  the  couch  of  the  dying  Lorenzo 
de'  Medici  fruits  meet  for  repentance  as  a  condition  of  abso- 
lution; of  the  sick  and  prostrate  Wyclif  resisting  the  emis- 
saries of  Rome  who  had  crept  into  his  bedchamber  at 
Lutterworth  to  receive  his  dying  recantation ;  of  Latimer 
over  the  greatest  and  most  headstrong  of  the  Tudor  kings; 


The  Cardinal  Function  95 

of  Cranmer  over  his  relentless  enemies  and  his  own  instinc- 
tive shrinking  from  the  tortures  of  martyrdom ;  of  William 
Farel  over  Calvin  ;  of  John  Howe  over  Cromwell ;  of  Mas- 
sillon  over  Louis  XIV ;  of  Chalmers  over  Carlyle ;  of 
Frederick  William  Robertson  over  the  honest  doubters  of 
Brighton ;  of  Lyman  Beecher  over  the  brilliant  young  Wen- 
dell Phillips ;  of  Charles  G.  Finney  over  the  hard-headed  law- 
yers of  Rochester,  N.  Y,;  of  Peter  Akers  and  Thomas  H. 
Stockton  over  the  honest  Springfield  laywer  whom  a  wise 
Providence  had  foredoomed  to  conduct  a  great  nation  safely 
through  the  furnace  of  affliction  for  four  eventful  years. 

This  same  loyalty  to  conviction  made  Calvin  prince  of 
Geneva  and  pope  of  the  Reformed  Churches,  gave  John 
Knox  an  almost  undisputed  control  over  the  religious  life 
and  thought  of  Scotland  in  the  latter  half  of  the  sixteenth 
century,  enabled  Baxter,  though  physically  frail,  to  hallow 
all  the  hearthstones  of  Kidderminster  by  his  prayers  and 
pastoral  visits,  and  as  a  fire  in  the  bones  of  Bunyan  drew 
more  than  a  thousand  people  to  welcome  his  words  in  the 
early  dawn  of  a  week-day  winter's  morning  on  his  occasional 
visits  to  London.  It  made  Francis  d'Assisi  a  sweet  and 
amiable  saint ;  St.  Dominic,  an  irresistible  propagandist ; 
Xavier,  Brainerd  Carey,  and  Martyn,  great  missionaries  ;  St. 
Augustine,  Beza,  and  Arminius,  princes  in  the  great  domain 
of  theology.  It  led  John  Wesley  to  see,  after  a  careful 
perusal  of  Jeremy  Taylor's  Holy  Living  and  Dying,  that  all 
he  had  or  was  or  might  become  by  diligent  use  of  his  pow- 
ers, place,  and  opportunities  "  must  either  be  a  sacrifice  to 
God  or  to  himself,"  and  to  act  accordingly  without  a 
moment's  intermission  or  truancy  for  more  than  fifty  labori- 
ous and  fruitful  years. 

5.  Persuasive  Power. 

A  natural  outcome  of  conviction  is  persuasive  power, 
giving  the  Christian  orator  a  control  over  the  intellectual 


96  Ecce  Clerus   . 

and  ethical  nature  of  man  such  as  no  other  speaker  can 
possess  in  an  equal  degree.  Even  that  which  seems  to 
approach  it  in  point  of  effectiveness,  in  parliamentary  or 
forensic  effort,  owes  all  its  real  force  to  the  same  strong 
sense  of  moral  right  and  responsibility.  When  Lord  Chatham 
succeeded  for  a  time  in  crippling  the  efforts  of  Lord  North's 
government  to  oppress  the  American  colonies  it  was  that 
great  statesman's  firm  belief  in  the  supremacy  of  moral 
principles  that  gave  effect  to  his  memorable  protest :  "  You 
cannot  conquer  America.  If  I  were  an  American,  as  I  am 
an  Englishman,  while  a  foreign  troop  was  landed  in  my 
country,  I  never  would  lay  down  my  arms — never!  never! 
NEVER  !  "  To  the  same  sublime  confidence  in  truth  and 
justice  is  to  be  attributed  the  success  as  advocates  of  free- 
dom and  equity  of  such  men  as  Patrick  Henry  in  Virginia 
and  James  Otis  in  Massachusetts,  of  William  Wilberforce 
contending  for  the  emancipation  of  the  slaves  in  the  British 
West  Indies,  of  Richard  Cobden  and  John  Bright  urging  on 
Sir  Robert  Peel  and  his  government  the  reversal  of  the  Corn 
Law  policy,  of  Wendell  Phillips  defending  against  over- 
whelming odds  the  character  and  conduct  of  the  ill-fated 
Elijah  Lovejoy  in  Faneuil  Hall,  of  Mr.  Gladstone  plead- 
ing before  the  English  people  the  cause  of  the  massacred 
Bulgarians  against  the  Turk  and  the  criminal  apathy  of  a 
Tory  government. 

But  the  platform,  the  senate,  and  the  bar  cannot  be  ex- 
pected to  inspire  the  highest  style  of  eloquence  to  the  same 
extent  as  the  Christian  pulpit.  With  the  lecturer,  the  legis- 
lator, and  the  advocate  the  case  is  always  more  or  less  com- 
plicated and  the  issue  doubtful.  The  burden  of  the  preacher, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  not  so  much  a  burden  of  proof  {onus 
probandt)  as  it  is  the  effective  announcement  of  the  message 
of  God's  love  and  the  free  offer  of  reconciliation  to  men 
self-condemned,  consciously  lost,  and  hopeless  and  eternally 
wretched  without  divine  mercy.     "  Knowing,  therefore,  the 


The  Cardinal  Function  97 

fear  of  the  Lord,  we  persuade  men."  It  is  the  strength  and 
clearness  of  God's  case  in  the  interminable  controversy  with 
man  that  makes  the  simplest  presentation  of  the  leading 
verities  of  the  Gospel  by  the  thoroughly  convinced  and 
consecrated  preacher  **  the  power  of  God  unto  salvation." 
The  present  writer  has  seen  more  than  two  thousand  people 
in  Spurgeon's  Tabernacle  overmastered  by  the  emotions  with 
which  they  struggled,  pocket  handkerchief  in  hand,  while 
the  preacher,  who  had  just  returned  from  his  winter  asylum 
in  the  Riviera,  still  partly  lame  with  gout  and  evidently 
suffering,  leaned  heavily  on  the  rail  of  his  platform,  and  with 
a  pathos  of  tone  and  manner  impossible  to  describe  besought 
the  six  thousand  people  before  him  to  "  stagger  not  at  the 
promise  of  God  through  unbelief,  but  to  be  strong  in  faith, 
giving  glory  to  God."*  John  Wesley's  Journals  are  full  of 
such  scenes,  and  Whitefield  lived  and  even  died  in  the 
midst  of  them.  "  O  God  !  is  it  a  man  or  an  angel,"  rever- 
ently exclaimed  Robert  Hall,  himself  known  as  the  "prince 
of  preachers,"  instinctively  rising  to  his  feet  as  Richard 
Watson,  tall,  thin,  and  pale,  but  handsome,  described  to  a 
large  congregation  the  security,  blessedness,  and  honor  of 
those  who  have  safely  consummated  their  earthly  pilgrim- 
age and  reached  the  world  out  of  sight.  "  For  about  half 
an  hour,"  says  an  eyewitness,  describing  a  remarkable 
scene  when  Bishop  Simpson  once  preached  in  the  Congre- 
gational Memorial  Hall,  London,  "  he  spoke  quietly,  without 
gesticulation  or  uplifting  of  his  voice  ;  then,  picturing  the 
Son  of  God  bearing  our  sins  in  his  own  body  to  the  tree,  he 
stooped,  as  if  laden  with  an  immeasurable  burden,  and  ris- 
ing to  his  full  height,  he  seemed  to  throw  it  from  him,  cry- 
ing :  '  How  far  ?  As  far  as  east  is  distant  from  the  west,  so 
far  hath  he  removed  our  transgressions  from  us.'  The 
whole  assembly,  as  if  moved  by  an  irresistible  impulse,  rose, 
remained  standing  for   a  second   or  two,  then  sank  back 

*  The  preacher's  text  was  Rom.  iv,  20. 


98  Ecce  Clerus 

into  their  seats.  A  professor  of  elocution  was  there.  A 
friend  who  observed  him  .  .  .  asked  him  when  the  service 
was  over,  '  Well,  what  do  you  think  of  the  bishop's  elocu- 
tion .'' '  *  Elocution  ! '  was  the  reply,  *  that  man  doesn't  want 
elocution ;  he's  got  the  Holy  Ghost.'  " 

6*  Definiteness  of  Aim. 

But  even  the  highest  order  of  manhood  and  the  intensest 
personal  convictions  conjoined  with  power  to  move  men's 
wills  and  lead  them  to  decision  require  a  point  of  concen- 
tration— need  to  be  complemented  and  crowned  by  a  defi- 
nite and  sustained  purpose  to  bless.  It  can  never  be  justly 
alleged  that  the  Gospel  has  failed  until  it  has  been  fairly 
tried.  And  it  cannot  be  said  to  have  been  fairly  tried  until 
its  preachers  become  thoroughly  inoculated  with  its  self- 
abnegating  and  aggressive  genius,  with  that  infinite  and  in- 
satiable desire  for  the  salvation  of  men  which  the  author  of 
£cce  Homo  happily  designates  the  "  enthusiasm  of  human- 
ity." "  If  God  did  not  give  me  souls,  I  think  I  should  die," 
exclaimed  Whitefield.  "  I  would  think  it  greater  happiness 
for  myself,"  wrote  that  most  popular  and  most  practical  of 
commentators,  Matthew  Henry,  "  to  gain  even  one  soul  to 
Christ  than  mountains  of  gold  and  silver."  And  Brainerd, 
as  he  waited  in  the  evening  of  his  bright  but  too  brief  day 
for  the  "  chariot  "  to  appear,  murmured,  reminiscentially 
and  thankfully,  "  I  cared  not  where  or  how  I  lived,  or  what 
hardships  I  passed  through,  so  that  I  could  but  gain  souls 
to  Christ.  While  I  was  asleep  I  dreamed  of  such  things, 
and  when  I  waked  the  first  thing  I  thought  of  was  this  of 
winning  souls  to  Christ."  Like  many  noble  young  minds 
who  are  to-day  being  disciplined  by  apparent  failure  in  the 
first  years  of  their  ministry  for  greater  spiritual  achieve- 
ments in  the  days  to  come,  John  Chrysostom  mourned  the 
fruitlessness  of  his  preaching  while  crowds  hung  unweariedly 
upon  his  lips.     One  night  he  seemed  in  a  vision  to  be 


The  Cardinal  Function  99 

preaching  in  the  Cathedral  Church  of  Antioch,  and  amid 
the  attentive  multitude  he  saw  "  One  like  unto  the  Son  of 
man,"  listening  with  an  intent  yet  grieved  look  upon  his 
kingly  brow.  The  Lord  was  waiting,  and  apparently  in 
vain,  for  some  word  which  he  might  apply  to  dying  souls 
who  had  gathered  from  the  dim  streets  of  the  city  to  hear 
"  the  Gospel  of  the  grace  of  God."  From  that  day  the 
preaching  of  Chrysostom  was  changed,  and  anxious  souls 
were  gathered  into  the  kingdom  of  God.  It  is  in  this  vol- 
untary returning  of  men  to  the  love  and  service  of  their 
Creator  that  the  true  glory  of  Christianity  lies  ;  and  yet, 
notwithstanding  its  learning,  its  eloquence,  its  earnestness, 
and  its  exalted  moral  character,  perhaps  nothing  is  more 
painfully  characteristic  of  the  ministry  of  the  times  than  the 
want  of  clear,  continuous  insight  into  the  supreme  aim  and 
purpose  of  the  great  dispensation  of  mercy  and  deliverance 
under  which  it  is  our  privilege  to  live. 

?♦  A  Standing  Attestation  of  the  Spirituality  of  the  Christian  Religion. 

But  if  the  preaching  function  of  the  ministry,  as  above 
explained,  be  the  central  and  dominant  one,  it  is  also  the 
one  abiding  attestation  and  guarantee  of  the  spirituality  and 
inwardness  of  Christianity,  "  Faith  cometh  by  hearing,  and 
hearing  by  the  word  of  Christ.  But  how  shall  they  believe 
in  him  whom  they  have  not  heard  ?  And  how  shall  they 
hear  without  a  proclaimer?  And  how  shall  they  proclaim 
except  they  be  sent,  even  as  it  is  written,  How  beautiful 
are  the  feet  of  them  that  bring  glad  tidings  of  good 
things  !  " 

The  triumph  of  the  preacher  is  the  victory  of  faith  ;  his 
suppression  or  enfeeblement  is  its  sure  decline  and  death. 
The  status  of  the  preacher,  and  not  this  or  that  element  of 
doctrine,  is  the  true  articulus  stantis  aut  cadentis  ecclesicB — 
the  test  of  a  growing  or  declining  Church.  To  no  fact  does 
history  bear  a  clearer  or  more  unequivocal  witness  than  to 


100  Ecce  Clerus 

this.  From  the  time  of  Cyprian  the  tendency  to  substitute 
the  priest  for  the  proclaimer ;  to  emphasize  the  eucharistic 
sacrifice  as  a  spectacle  addressed  to  the  eye,  to  the  neglect  of 
the  living  message  spoken  to  the  understanding,  the  con- 
science, and  the  heart,  steadily  grew,  with  now  and  then  a 
feeble  and  feverish  spasm  of  revolt,  until  the  light  of  the 
glorious  Gospel  of  Christ  feebly  glimmered  on  the  verge  of 
absolute  extinction  amid  the  far-extending  gloom  and  super- 
stition of  the  early  Middle  Ages.  A  great  spiritual  force 
which  requires  its  living  agent  to  be  morally  and  intellec- 
tually at  his  best  was  supplanted  almost  universally  by  a 
sacramental  celebration,  which,  however  significant,  beauti- 
ful, and  necessary,  makes  no  imperious  demand  on  the 
ethical  and  intellectual  nature  of  the  celebrant.  The  whole 
nature  and  drift  of  the  Christian  ministry  suffered  from  the 
change,  and  the  service  of  God  was  performed  with  feelings 
and  motives  worthy  only  of  a  heathen  fetich.  It  was,  as 
contemplated  in  this  degraded  form — when  he  saw  the  vul- 
gar peddler  of  a  huckstering  Church  offering  for  sale  the 
mercies  of  heaven  in  the  street,  and  promising  the  people 
release  of  their  relatives  and  friends  from  purgatorial  pains 
on  payment  of  a  coin — that  it  aroused  the  moral  indignation 
of  Luther,  as  it  had  before  provoked  the  courageous  criti- 
cism of  Wyclif  in  England,  of  Hus  in  Bohemia,  and  of 
Wessel  and  Wesel  and  other  pre-Reformation  reformers  in 
Germany  and  Italy. 

For  many  successive  centuries  Christianity  as  a  spiritual 
religion  lost  its  hold  on  the  intellect  of  Europe,  and  the 
philosophy  of  Aristotle  usurped  the  place  of  the  Sermon  on 
the  Mount  and  the  teachings  of  St.  Paul.  Philosophers, 
heretics,  eremites,  monks,  idle  or  aspiring  ecclesiastics  of 
various  grades  and  orders  abounded, 

Thick  as  autumnal  leaves  in  Vallombrosa, 
but  preachers  were  few  or  none ;  and  sincere  faith  and 


The  Cardinal  Function  101 

godly  living  almost  vanished  from  a  Church  whose  chief 
shepherd — and  he  not  the  worst  of  his  order — blushed  not 
to  insinuate  to  his  fellow-hirelings  of  the  desecrated  fold, 
"  The  Christian  fable  has  been  very  useful  to  us." 

In  times  of  spontaneous  popular  awakening,  like  that  led 
by  St.  Francis  d'Assisi  and  his  Brothers  Minor  in  Italy,  or 
in  moments  of  peril  to  the  hierarchical  authority,  as  at  the 
time  of  the  Reformation,  when,  as  Ranke  points  out,  the 
reigning  pope,  Clement  VII,  dreaded  to  accept  the  sug- 
gestion of  the  emperor,  Charles  V,  and  submit  the  affairs  of 
the  Church  to  the  consideration  of  a  general  council,  liberty 
has  been  given  to  the  preacher  to  restore  the  confidence 
which  the  priest  had  forfeited,  and  revive  the  waste  places 
which  the  priest  had  made  desolate  and  barren.*  But, 
though  by  the  preaching  of  such  men  as  Francis  and  Dom- 
inic, and  Bernard  of  Clairvaux,  in  the  eleventh  and  twelfth 
centuries,  and  by  that  of  Savonarola  in  the  closing  years  of 
the  fifteenth,  and  of  Xavier  and  Lainez  in  the  sixteenth,  a 
powerful  preaching  impulse  was  given,  for  a  time,  to  a  por- 
tion of  the  regular  clergy  such  reforms  were  so  completely 
out  of  harmony  with  the  interests  and  traditions  of  the 
Catholic  hierarchy  that  they  were  doomed  irrevocably  to  a 
speedy  death.  Every  such  movement  has  had,  like  that  of 
St.  Francis,  its  Ugolino,  and  has  had  to  yield  ultimately  to 
ecclesiastical  pressure,  intrigue,  diplomacy,  or  violence.  The 
Church  which  exalts  the  mass  has  no  normal  place  for  the 
preacher  who  points  the  eager  eye  of  men  to  a  risen  and 
triumphant  Christ,  just  as  the  ceremonial  and  priestly  sys- 
tem of  the  temple  had  no  place  for  the  prophet  with  his 

*  "  The  word  '  priest '  has  two  different  senses.  In  the  one  it  is  a  synonym  for  pres- 
byter or  elder,  and  designates  the  minister  who  presides  over  and  instructs  a  Christian 
congregation  ;  in  the  other  it  is  equivalent  to  the  Latin  sacerdos,  the  Greek  lepFvg,  or  the 
Hebrew  j'..'^  {theofferer  of  sacrifices),  who  also  performs  other  mediatorial  offices  be- 
tween God  and  man.  How  the  confusion  between  these  two  meanings  has  affected 
the  history  and  theology  of  the  Church  it  will  be  instructive  to  consider." — Lightfoot, 
"  St.  Paul's  Epistles,"  p.  i86.  It  is  needless  to  say  that  the  word  "  priest"  is  used  in 
the  text  in  the  latter  and  more  common  of  these  two  senses. 


102  Ecce  Clerus 

sublime  moral  teachings.  Where  the  error  of  this  great  per- 
version is  persisted  in,  as  is  the  case  to-day  over  two  thirds 
of  Christendom,  the  priest  stands  forever  at  the  altar,  look- 
ing back  through  the  dismal  shadows  of  the  past  and  saying 
to  a  sinful  and  despairing  world,  of  Him  who  is  the  only 
source  of  hope,  *'  He  is  dead  !  He  is  dead  !  "  Where,  on 
the  other  hand,  a  nobler  and  truer  faith  is  held  and  pro- 
claimed, the  preacher  is  a  prophet,  and  goes  forth  with  his 
face  illumined  with  the  light  of  the  "good  time  coming," 
proclaiming  the  welcome  and  exultant  news,  "  He  is  risen, 
and  is  become  the  first  fruits  of  them  that  slept."  The 
priest  gloomily  concentrates  the  attention  of  faith  on  a 
cross  from  which  the  mangled  and  bleeding  form  of  the 
Redeemer  has  never  been  taken  down  ;  the  preacher  directs 
the  eye  to  the  empty  sepulcher  illumined  with  the  radiance 
of  angelic  visitants,  and  from  whose  dark  and  cold  interior 
the  Lord  has  ascended  to  heaven. 


APPENDIX  TO  CHAPTER  IV 

The  verb  KTjgvoaeiv  {to  proclaini)  occurs  6i  times  in  the 
New  Testament ;  40  of  these  are  found  in  the  Synoptists, 
19  in  the  epistles  of  St.  Paul,  and  2  elsewhere.  Krjgvyfia 
occurs  16  times — in  Matthew  8,  in  Luke  2,  in  St.  Paul's 
epistles  6.  'EvayyeXi^eadai  is  met  with  55  times,  Luke  em- 
ploying it,  in  his  gospel  and  in  the  Acts,  25  times  ;  St.  Paul  24, 
and  other  New  Testament  writers  6.  KarayyeXXeiv  occurs 
in  18  places;  11  of  these  are  in  the  Acts  and  the  rest  in 
Paul's  epistles.     EvayyeXiov  is  used  77  times. 

In  one  instance  only  does  John  allow  himself  the  use  of 
the  verb  Krjpvaaeiv^  twice  the  use  of  evayyeXi^eadai,  once 
of  the  noun  evayyeXiov,  and  all  these  are  found  in  the 
Apocalypse,  which  the  best  modern  critics  assign  to  a  period 
twenty-five  years  before  the  composition  of  the  fourth 
gospel,  when  the  evangelist  was  still,  we  may  assume,  to 


The  Cardinal  Function  103 

some  extent  under  the  influence  of  the  original  evangelical 
terminology.  On  the  other  hand,  the  verb  nagrvgelv  occurs 
47  times  in  St.  John's  writings  and  only  twice  elsewhere, 
while  the  noun  fiapTvpia  is  used  31  times  by  him  and  7 
times  by  other  New  Testament  writers.  With  the  words 
KTJQvyiia,  KTjQvooeLV,  KarayyeXXeiv,  evayyeXc^eoOai,  evayyeXtov^ 
John  must  have  been  very  familiar.  From  their  constant 
use  by  the  Synoptists  and  the  apostle  Paul  it  is  clear  that 
they  formed  an  essential  and  marked  characteristic  of  the 
original  or  oral  gospel,  and  that  they  or  their  Aramaic 
equivalents  were  the  words  deliberately  chosen  and  em- 
ployed by  Christ  and  his  great  Forerunner  to  express  the 
leading  significance  and  feature  of  their  mission.  And  in 
this  they  are  in  perfect  harmony  with  the  Messianic  fore- 
casts of  the  Old  Testament  and  apocryphal  literature  and 
with  the  usage  of  the  Septuagint.  This  studied  and  com- 
plete avoidance  on  the  part  of  the  author  of  the  fourth 
gospel  of  the  commonly  accepted  terminology  of  the  great 
and  ever-expanding  evangelical  circle  is  very  striking  ;  but 
it  is  impossible  at  this  distance  of  time  to  divine  any  ade- 
quate reason  for  it.  His  object  may  have  been  to  bring  the 
proclamation  {Krjpvyfia)  of  the  good  news  (evayyeXtov)  into 
closer  relation  to  the  personal  experience  and  convictions 
of  the  proclaimer  (/C7/pv|),  and  to  emphasize  the  important 
fact  that,  while  preaching  is  necessarily  an  announcement 
of  great  historical  facts,  it  is  still  more  the  utterance  of  such 
truths  transmuted  into  vital  elements  of  experience  and  per- 
sonally attested  by  the  preacher's  own  spiritual  life.  This 
purpose  evidently  influenced  both  the  author's  selection  of 
materials  from  the  common  evangelical  tradition  and  his 
mode  of  treating  them.  In  the  Synoptists  Christ  is  a 
preacher  of  good  news  to  the  people  ;  in  John's  gospel  he  is 
uniformly  in  conflict  with  the  Jewish  authorities — a  witness 
against  their  moral  and  intellectual  obtuseness  and  organized 
hypocrisy.     In  the  former  he  is  the  Herald  of  the  king- 


104  Ecce  Clems 

dom  ;   in  the  latter  he  is  both  in  intention  and  effect  a 
martyr  to  the  cause  of  truth. 

But  whatever  may  have  been  the  motive  of  this  marked  de- 
parture from  the  fixed  terminological  vogue  and  usage  of  the 
early  Church,  or  its  passing  effect  on  contemporary  Chris- 
tian thought,  it  evidently  produced  no  permanent  impres- 
sion, nor  has  it  perceptibly  tinctured  the  subsequent  current 
of  Christian  literature.  Christianity  is  characteristically 
and  essentially  an  evangel,  boldly  and  aggressively  pro- 
claimed to  the  world,  and  not  merely  a  conviction  cour- 
ageously and  faithfully  attested  by  the  believer  when  called 
upon  or  compelled  to  appear  before  the  bar  of  the  world. 
It  is  more  an  ever-living  and  spontaneous  message  to  the 
ignorant  and  indifferent  multitude  than  an  occasional  and 
involuntary  testimony  against  a  few  powerful  gainsayers  who 
are  willing  to  use  their  influence  and  authority  as  repre- 
sentatives of  the  civil  power  for  its  suppression. 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  105 


CHAPTER  V 
The  Theme  of  Preaching- 

Uaaav  re  y/iepav  tv  r^  lepu  /cat  /car'  oIkov  ovk  ewavovTO  diddaKovreg  Kal 
evayyeXil^S/ievoi  rbv  Xpiarbv  'Irjaovv. — Luke  (Acts  v,  42). 
'H//e<f  6e  KJipvaaofiev  Xpiarbv  iaravpu/xEvov. — Paul. 
"Lnaprav  l/la;j;ef,  rairav  K6a/i£i. — Laconian  Proverb. 

I.  The  Only  Saving  Naxnc 

Christianity  does  not  challenge  the  attention  of  the 
world  simply  as  a  competitor  with  other  religions  for  popular 
acceptance  and  belief;  nor  is  it  content  to  take  its  place 
as  one  among  other  ethical  forces  that  have  been,  and  are 
to-day,  working  for  the  moral  uplift  and  amelioration  of 
mankind.  Its  position  is  lofty  and  exclusive.  It  professes 
not  only  to  contain  in  itself  the  few  fragments  of  essential 
truth  found  in  mutilated  shape  and  in  alliance  with  various 
errors  in  pre-Christian  and  extra-Christian  cults,  and  present 
them  in  purer  and  nobler  forms,  but  to  supplement  them 
with  disclosures  indispensable  to  the  complete  moral  and  in- 
tellectual development  and  spiritual  well-being  of  mankind. 
Its  contention  is  that  there  can  be  no  adequate  conception 
of  God  or  of  man  ;  no  sufficient  rule  of  life,  or  standard  of 
character,  or  mastery  of  moral  evil  or  perfect  human  hap- 
piness, here  or  hereafter,  apart  from  the  manifestation  of  the 
Son  of  God.  It  claims  to  be  the  one  eternal  and  absolute 
religion  ultimately  destined  to  universal  and  undisputed 
sway.  Consistently  with  this  claim  it  ascribes  to  its  Founder 
an  unapproachable  moral  grandeur  and  an  unrivaled 
authority — insisting  that  his  person,  mission,  and  work  shall 
be  the  sole  center  of  religious  interest,  and  constitute  the 
abiding   substance   of    Christian   doctrine    and   discourse. 


106  Ecce  Clerus 

"  Sparta  is  your  lot  and  choice,"  ran  the  motto  of  Laconian 
loyalty.  "  Show  off  Sparta  to  the  best  advantage."  And  a 
devotion  equally  single-hearted  and  sincere  is  required  of 
him  who  aspires  to  be  a  publisher  of  "  the  glad  tidings  of 
good  things,"  "  Christ  is  your  inheritance  and  hope,"  cries 
the  Church  to  her  chosen  spokesmen  and  representatives. 
"  Let  him  be  the  burden  of  your  thought  and  witnessing  ; 
do  your  best  for  him.  For  *  him  hath  God  exalted  with  his 
right  hand  to  be  a  prince  and  a  Saviour,  for  to  give  repent- 
ance to  Israel  and  the  forgiveness  of  sins.'  *  Neither  is  there 
any  other  name  under  heaven  given  among  men  whereby  we 
must  be  saved.* " 

2*  The  Person  of  Clirist. 

It  is  needless  to  say  that  the  man  who  approximates,  how- 
ever remotely,  to  the  ideal  of  the  Christian  preacher,  con- 
templated in  the  New  Testament,  must  take  high  ground  as 
to  the  person  of  Christ.  His  conviction  and  attitude  as  to 
this  will  ever  be  the  great  determinant  of  his  spirit,  character, 
message,  and  success.  Christ  is  much  to  the  world  or  little 
according  as  the  doctrine  of  his  person  is  construed;  ac- 
cording as  reason,  working  within  its  own  circumscribed 
limits  and  hampered  with  the  immense  difficulties  that  beset 
it,  persists  in  retaining  him  on  the  plane  of  ordinary 
humanity,  or  faith,  reverently  bowing  to  the  authority  of 
the  revealed  word,  concedes  to  him  "  a  name  which  is  above 
every  name,"  and  sees  him  exalted  to  a  place  "  far  above 
all  heavens  that  he  might  fill  all  things."  Great  as  have 
been  the  learning  and  eloquence,  the  philanthropic  activity 
and  public-spiritedness,  the  dialectical  dexterity  and  skill, 
and,  what  is  of  still  greater  consequence,  the  high  moral 
character  and  purpose  of  many  of  those  to  whom  belief  in 
Christ's  absolute  and  proper  divinity  was  like  grasping  the 
mist  or  building  on  the  sand  ;  powerfully  as  some  of  these 
men  influenced  scientific  and  intellectual  advancement  in 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  107 

their  times,  not  one  of  them  has  left  any  deep  mark  as  a 
preacher  of  the  Christian  salvation.  And  there  was  a 
reason  for  their  failure.  A  religion  which  insists  on  ex- 
plaining or  dissipating  all  mysteries  does  not  necessarily 
justify  itself  to  human  reason,  while  it  leaves  the  nobler 
elements  of  man's  nature — his  heart  and  imagination — un- 
touched. The  power  of  Christianity  has  always  lain  in  the 
incomprehensible  sublimity  and  grandeur  of  its  fundamental 
truths,  and  in  the  charm  they  have  exerted  over  man's  im- 
aginative and  emotional,  not  less  than  over  his  intellectual, 
susceptibilities.  The  Roman  augurs,  in  performing  the 
solemn  functions  of  their  office,  are  said  to  have  laughed 
each  other  in  the  face  because  it  seemed  to  them  that  in  ex- 
amining the  smoking  entrails  of  the  slaughtered  animals 
they  saw  all  that  was  to  be  seen  and  knew  all  that  was  to  be 
known ;  and  that  hope  or  fear  or  forecast  based  on  the  con- 
dition of  the  omens  was  nothing  but  the  sheerest  supersti- 
tion. The  proclaimer  of  the  stupendous  marvel  of  human 
redemption  has  no  temptation  to  be  frivolous.  The  Chris- 
tian Church  is  a  generator  and  nurse  of  the  faith  and  adora- 
tion both  of  angels  and  men,*  because  she  is  the  depository 
and  propagandist  not  of  a  group  of  vague  and  senseless 
superstitions,  but  of  the  hidden  secret  of  the  agesf — the 
mystery  {to  fivarripiov)  which,  though  it  open  to  the  ap- 
proach of  faith,  yet  broadens  with  the  expansion  of  human 
thought  and  deepens  with  the  growth  of  man's  nobler  life 
and  experience,  and  ever  moves  in  advance  of  his  intel- 
lectual march  like  the  pillar  of  cloud  by  day  and  the  pillar 
of  fire  by  night  which  guided  Israel's  wanderings  in  the 
desert.  It  was  no  inadequately  trained  exponent,  but  the 
master  mind  of  the  first  great  cycle  of  Christian  thought — a 
thinker  whose  influence  on  the  course  of  Christian  civiliza- 
tion has  been  incalculable — commanding  the  respect  of  men 
of  light   and  leading  for  nigh  two   thousand    years — who 

*  Eph.  iii,  9,  lo ;  I  Pet.  i,  12.  t  Eph.  iii,  9. 


108  Ecce  Clerus 

wrote  in  a  letter  to  his  young  friend,  "  Confessedly  great  is 
the  mystery  of  godliness;  he  who  was  manifested  in  the  flesh, 
justified  in  the  spirit,  seen  of  angels,  preached  among  the 
nations,  believed  on  in  the  world,  received  up  in  glory."* 

Nor  can  it  be  complained  that  Christianity,  in  exclusively 
confining  its  ministry  to  the  proclaiming  among  the  nations 
of  the  transcendent  mystery  of  Christ's  manifestation  and 
the  salvation  thereby  accomplished  and  provided,  tends  to 
contract  the  legitimate  range  of  human  interest  and  narrow 
the  realm  of  man's  intellectual  freedom  and  research.  It  is 
said  of  the  celebrated  European  singer,  Caffarelli,  that,  after 
having  been  kept  practicing,  in  spite  of  frequent  protests  and 
complaints,  some  elementary  yet  difficult  vocal  exercises,  for 
seven  years,  his  master  one  day  put  his  hand  on  his  head 
and  said  fondly  and  complacently,  "Go  forth,  my  son,  to 
wealth  and  fame;  you  are  the  finest  singer  in  Europe." 
Similarly  the  simple  discipline  of  the  cross  of  Christ 
patiently  submitted  to  is  the  secret  of  all  greatness,  moral 
and  intellectual,  giving  men  and  nations  complete  mastery 
over  their  powers  and  leading  them  to  the  happy  fulfillment 
of  their  mission  and  destiny. 

The  system  of  thought  that  contemplates  the  nature, 
offices,  and  work  of  the  Son  of  God,  as  set  forth  in  the  Chris- 
tian documents,  can  never  be  superficial  and  narrow,  but 
must  be  deep,  discursive  and  elevated,  making  more  or  less 
intimate  acquaintance  with  many  departments  of  knowledge, 
and  necessarily  with  the  noblest  and  mightiest  truths  of  all, 
A  single  word  with  its  profound  and  comprehensive  signifi- 
cance selected  from  among  others,  relating  to  different 
aspects  of  Christ's  many-sided  nature,  will  show  how  strikingly 
this  is  so.  The  epithet  Firstborn  (rrpwroroKoc),  applied  to 
him  as  the  "Image  of  the  Invisible  God"  in  Col,  i,  15, 
occurs  five  times  in  the  New  Testament,  and  in  these  five 
instances  the  place  and  function  assigned  to  Christ  may  be 

•  t  Tim.  iii,  16, 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  109 

said  to  offer  a  true,  complete,  and  satisfactory  solution  of 
every  serious  problem  of  life,  thought,  and  destiny,  (i)  He 
is  placed  in  relation  to  the  cosmos — its  genesis,  order,  life, 
and  government,  as  its  originator  and  upholder,  the  reason 
of  its  being,  the  determiner  of  its  goal.  He  is,  in  fact,  the 
firstborn  of  the  physical  creation  {npoyroTOKog  ndarjg  KTiasojg) 
on  whom  the  system  of  universal  nature  depends  and  in 
whom  it  hangs  together.*  He  thus  supplies  the  answer  to 
the  deepest  questions  at  once  of  ancient  philosophy  and  of 
modern  science.  (2)  He  stands  in  relation  to  redeemed 
humanity  as  its  creator,  head,  exemplar,  and  standard  of 
perfection.  He  is  the  firstborn  among  many  brethren 
(TrpwrdroKOf  ev  -noXXolg  ddeA^oI^-) — the  eternal  moral  arche- 
type to  which  every  true-born  child  of  God  is  predestined 
to  be  conformed.!  He  thus  holds  the  key  to  every  problem 
of  the  heart  and  the  conscience,  and  throws  a  flood  of 
light  on  the  dark  and  often  appalling  enigmas  of  divine 
Providence.  (3)  He  is  the  first  begotten  from  the  dead 
(ngiOTOTOKog  eic  rdv  veapwv) — the  Moses  of  our  triumphant 
exodus  from  the  Egypt  of  the  grave ;  |  and  the  firstborn 
of  the  dead  (6  TrpwrdroKOf  twv  ve«;pa)v)§ — pledge  and  prophet 
of  our  immortality.  (4)  He  is  the  preeminent  one,  the  first- 
born (6  TrpwTOTOKOf) ;  absolute  and  supreme  Head  of  all 
created  being,  concerning  whom,  at  the  inauguration  of  the 
new  and  everlasting  economy  of  the  future,  it  is  to  be  said, 
"And  let  all  the  angels  of  God  worship  him."||  Such  is 
one  of  the  many  broad  glimpses  afforded  us  in  the  New 
Testament  of  the  divine  and  adorable  personality  whose 
exalted  name,  saving  power,  and  inexhaustible  wealth  of 
resource  have  been  the  unwearying  theme  of  those  who,  for 
sixty  generations,  have  joyfully  heralded  everywhere  the 

*  Col.  1,  15.  t  Rom.  viii,  29.  %  CoL  i,  18. 

§  Rev.  i,  5.  The  best  ancient  authorities  as  represented  by  Lachmann,  Tregelles, 
and  Tischendorf  omit  the  preposition  ex  of  the  Textus  Receptus;  so  that  the  phrase 
seems  to  convey  the  idea  of  Christ's  supremacy  over  the  dead  as  the  pledge  of  the  sur- 
vival of  his  saints  and  the  final  judge  of  the  wicked.  1  Heb.  i,  6. 


110  Ecce  Clerus 

tidings  of  God's  love  and  mercy  to  mankind,  amply  justify- 
ing the  words  of  a  recent  writer  when  he  says,  "  Christ  is 
Revelation,  its  soul,  its  substance,  its  center  and  circumfer- 
ence, its  all  in  all."* 

3.  Our  Great  Exemplar* 

But  if  the  person  of  Christ  is  to  be  proclaimed  as  offering 
to  the  mind  of  man,  in  its  manifold  and  wide-reaching  sig- 
nificance, a  world  of  thought  and  contemplation  at  once 
progressive,  luminous,  comprehensive,  and  sufficient,  not 
less  is  he  to  be  presented  as  the  one  infallible  standard  of 
morals  and  arbiter  of  human  conduct.  To  only  one  born 
of  woman  has  it  been  given  to  make  to  hostile  scrutiny  the 
daring  challenge,  "  Which  of  you  convinceth  me  of  sin.-*" 
Of  one  only  could  it  ever  be  said  without  obvious  exaggera- 
tion that  he  was  "holy,  harmless,  undefiled,  and  separate 
from  sinners."  To  one  alone  could  the  discriminating 
bystander  point  the  finger  and  say,  "  Behold  the  Lamb  of 
God,  which  taketh  away  the  sin  of  the  world."  This  gives 
Jesus  of  Nazareth  a  place  unique  in  the  history  of  morals. 
He  stands  in  an  ethical  order  of  his  own,  the  first  in  it  and 
the  last.  The  light  of  his  example  shines  through  all  the 
avenues  of  human  life  in  its  almost  bewildering  multiformity 
of  phase  and  variety  of  experience,  penetrating  even  every 
corner  of  the  unseen  realm  of  motive.  "  Over  against  all 
false  and  meager  ideals  of  man's  capacity  and  destiny  he 
represents  the  great  reality;  he  is  the  Son  of  man."  By 
the  subtle  self-adjustment  and  far-reaching  application 
of  the  principles  which  his  spirit  and  acts  involve  he 
offers  infallible  ethical  guidance  to  all.  "  Born  a  man 
and  a  Jew,  in  a  carpenter's  family,  he  can  be  equally 
claimed    by   both    sexes,   by   all    classes,    by   men   of   all 

nations Each    race    has   its    special    aptitudes,    its 

'  glory  and  honor,'  and  as  the  glory  and  honor  of  each  na- 

♦  Clifford's  The  Inspiration  and  Authority  of  the  Bible,  p.  98. 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  111 

tion  has  been  brought  within  the  light  of  *  the  holy  city  ' 

the  versatility  and  intellect  of  the  Greeks,  the  majestic  dis- 
cipline ot  the  Romans,  the  strong  individuality  of  the  Teu- 
tons—each in  turn  has  been  able  to  find  its  true  ideal  in 
Jesus  of  Nazareth,  not  as  a  dream  of  the  imagination,  but 
as  a  fact  of  observation,  and  has  marveled  how  those  that 
were  in  Christ  before  them  could  be  blind  to  the  presence 
in  him  of  what  they  so  especially  value.  Looking  around 
us  we  search  in  vain  for  a  perfect  manhood,  nor  can  we 
find  any  promise  or  potency  of  such  an  ideal  within  our- 
selves, but  as  soon  as  we  contemplate  the  manhood  of 
Jesus  we  find  at  once  both  the  condemnation  of  what  we 
are  and  the  assurance  of  what  we  may  be.  As  Son  of  man 
he  claims  and  exercises  over  us  a  legitimate  authority,  the 
authority  of  acknowledged  perfection;  as  Son  of  man  he 
shows  us  what  human  nature  is  to  be  individually  and  so- 
cially, and  supplies  us  with  the  motives  and  the  means  for 
making  the  idea  real."  * 

This  is  the  immense  significance  and  value  for  the  min- 
istry of  all  time,  of  the  human  life  and  example  of  Christ. 
The  first  great  demand  and  triumph  of  the  Gospel  was  a 
complete  reversal  of  the  current  of  popular  thought,  a 
widespread  and  radical  change  {jiETdvoia)  of  individual 
minds,  but  this  only  as  preliminary  to  its  main  object, 
namely,  the  reformation  of  conduct,  the  renewal  and  re- 
construction of  the  individual  soul  and  of  society,  the  prac- 
tical and  cordial  conformity  of  men  to  the  eternal  law  of 
righteousness  as  revealed  and  exemplified  in  Christ.  The 
early  Christians  were  more  remarkable  for  the  singular 
purity  of  their  morals  and  the  sublime  unselfishness  of 
their  disposition  and  deportment  than  for  the  novelty  of 
their  beliefs  and  teaching,  which  were  never  very  peculiar 
except  as  regards  the  person  of  Christ.  Men  were  cer- 
tainly more  impressed  with  what  they  did  and  the  manner 

*  Dr.  Gore's,  The  Incarnation  of  the  Son  o/  God,  pp.  183,  185. 


112  Ecce  Clerus 

and  motive  of  their  doing  it  than  with  what  they  believed. 
From  this  peculiarity  sprang  one  of  the  most  appropriate 
and  suggestive  of  the  many  designations  by  which  the  first 
followers  of  Christ  were  popularly  known,  namely,  men  of 
"the  way"  (^  ocJof),  or  method.*  They  were  Methodists 
after  no  narrow,  conventional,  or  modern  fashion,  but  in  the 
deepest  and  broadest  sense,  inasmuch  as  the  line  of  conduct 
which  distinguished  them  aimed  at  nothing  short  of  the  estab- 
lishment of  an  absolute  rule  and  standard  of  morals  and  a 
complete  revolutionizing  of  the  prevailing  disposition  and 
manners  of  society  as  embodied  in  that  comprehensive  triad 
of  vices — "the  lust  of  the  eye,  the  lust  of  the  flesh  and  the 
pride  of  life."  In  the  entire  expression  of  their  inward  life ; 
in  their  faith  and  mutual  love  and  benevolent  care  for 
the  indigent  and  helpless  ;  in  their  habit  of  daily  prayer 
and  praise  as  "breaking  bread  from  house  to  house  they 
did  eat  their  meat  with  gladness  and  singleness  of  heart," 
they  proclaimed  Christ  as  their  living  model  {r\  o8o(^,  whose 
spirit  and  purpose  it  was  their  delight  to  share  and  exem- 
plify. In  the  warmth,  freedom,  and  purity  of  their  fellow- 
ship they  presented  to  the  eye  of  the  observer  the  micro- 
cosm of  a  redeemed  and  regenerated  social  order.  They 
trod  a  path  which  tended  ever  upward  and  heavenward, 
and  showed  no  footsteps  of  retreat.  And  whatever  may 
have  been  the  changes  that  have  passed  over  ethical  law 
and  science  and  the  constitution  of  human  society  since 
that  time,  they  have  not  proceeded  so  far  as  to  render  obso- 
lete or  inapplicable  the  example  of  Him  who  "  went  about 
doing  good,"  and  who  says  to-day  as  he  said  of  old,  **  He 
that  heareth  these  sayings  of  mine,  and  doeth  them,  shall  be 
likened  unto  a  wise  man,  which  built  his  house  upon  the  rock: 

*Comp.  John  xiv,  4,  6  ;  Acts  xvi,  17  ;  xviii,  a6  ;  xix,  9.  23.  It  is  "  a  way"  distin- 
guished by  various  epithets,  all  of  them  having  a  marked  ethical  significance;  "the 
way  of  salvation,''  "  the  way  of  God,"  "  the  way  which  they  call  heresy,"  in  allusion  to 
its  practical  divergence  from  the  inferior  code  of  conduct  commonly  adopted,  "  a  more 
excellent  way,"  "  the  way  into  the  holiest,"  "  a  new  and  living  way  which  he  hath 
consecrated,    "  the  way  of  truth,"  "  the  right  way,"  "  the  way  of  righteousness," 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  113 

and  the  rain  descended,  and  the  floods  came,  and  the  winds 
blew,  and  beat  upon  that  house  ;  and  it  fell  not:  for  it  was 
founded  upon  a  rock." 

4.  Teacher  of  His  People, 

Equally  deep  and  undying  is  the  interest  of  the  race  in 
Christ  as  the  prince  of  teachers.  In  this  aspect,  too,  he  is 
to  be  presented  as  one  claiming  universal  and  exclusive  au- 
thority, between  whom  and  the  most  eminent  and  exalted 
of  his  followers  there  yawns  an  impassable  chasm.  "  One 
is  your  Master"  —  leader,  teacher  (KadrjyrjT'qg)  —  "even 
Christ,"  he  said,  "  and  all  ye  are  brethren."  This  assump- 
tion of  didactic  supremacy  has  a  perennial  significance  and 
the  broadest  application.  While,  on  the  one  hand,  it  denies 
the  right  of  any  Augustus  or  Ponttfex,  baptized  or  pagan, 
or  any  imperium,  no  matter  what  its  antiquity  or  pretensions, 
to  "  lord  it  over  God's  heritage,"  on  the  other,  it  reduces 
the  great  Protestant  question  as  to  the  seat  of  authority  in 
religion,  so  much  discussed  in  our  time,  to  little  better 
than  an  impertinence.  "  The  Church  to  teach  and  the 
Bible  to  prove  ;  "  therefore  "Hear  the  Church,"  is  the  cry 
of  the  Anglican,  as  he  clamors  for  the  attention  he  imag- 
ines to  be  due  to  the  voice  of  the  historical  hierarchy  and 
the  great  general  councils  of  Christendom.*  "  Let  Reason 
speak  and  let  her  critical  findings  be  adhered  to  and  her 
dictates  be  obeyed,"  is  the  plea  of  the  liberal  school  of 
Channing,  Theodore  Parker,  Freeman  Clarke,  and  James 
Martineau,  emphasizing  the  sufficiency  of  the  inward  light 
and  the  exclusiveness  of  the  individual's  responsibility  to 
God — totally  oblivious  of  the  obvious  lesson  of  all  history 
that  "human  reason  can  never  generate  religious  certitude. 
"  The  Bible,  and  the  Bible  alone,  is  the  religion  of  Protes- 
tants," is  the  vague  and  illusive  contention  of  the  old-fash- 
ioned  evangelical,  as   he  clings  to    the  threadbare   motto 

♦  Dr.  Gore's  Bampton  Lectures,  p.  303. 

8 


114  Ecce  Clems 

which  he  owes  to  one  who  was  emphatically  "  a  reed  shaken 
by  the  wind,"  and  of  whom  it  may  almost  be  said  that  he 

Was  everything  by  turns  and  nothing  long.* 

"  There  is  a  triple  coordinate  source  of  faith  and  dogma, 
namely,  Revelation,  Reason,  and  the  Church,"  is  the  aver- 
ment of  a  school  of  recent  birth  represented  by  the  distin- 
guished American  Hebraist,  Dr.  C.  S.  Briggs;  while  the  Cath- 
olic is  content  with  the  Jesuitical  formula  that  the  hilt  of  the 
sword  of  authority  rests  at  Rome  in  a  hand  that  makes  its 
sharp  point  penetrate  everywhere  and  its  keen  and  ruthless 
blade  sever  every  knot  that  won't  untie.  Amid  this  eccle- 
siastical Babel  of  conflicting  voices  a  divinely  illumined 
and  living  ministry  could  hardly  propose  to  itself  a  nobler 
or  worthier  task  than  that  of  bringing  relief  alike  to  the 
thoughtful  few  and  to  the  busy  and  half-educated  thou- 
sands by  simply  and  earnestly  insisting  on  the  sole  and  suf- 
ficient authority  of  Christ  in  all  matters  pertaining  to  re- 
ligion and  the  soul.  "  I  am  the  way,  the  truth  and  the 
life  ;  "  "I  am  the  bread  of  life ;  he  that  cometh  to  me 
shall  never  hunger,  and  he  that  believeth  on  me  shall  never 
thirst;"  "I  am  the  door  of  the  sheep;  I  am  the  good 
shepherd,  and  know  my  sheep,  and  am  known  of  mine.  My 
sheep  hear  my  voice,  and  I  know  them,  and  they  follow  me: 
and  I  give  unto  them  eternal  life ;  "  "  This  is  the  work  of 
God,  that  ye  believe  on  him  whom  he  hath  sent ;  "  "  Let 
these  words  sink  down  into  your  ears ; "  thus  spake  he 
who  taught  "  as  one  having  authority,  and  not  as  the 
scribes  ;  "  he  concerning  whom  the  voice  from  heaven  bore 
witness,  "  This  is  my  beloved  Son  ;  hear  him." 

Obvious  and  admitted,  however,  as  is  the  claim  of  Jesus 
to  supreme  and  exclusive  authority  over  the  souls  of  men, 
the  superior  excellence  of  his  teaching  is  not  to  be  sought 
where  one  would  naturally  expect  it.     He  does  not  profess 

*  See  "  Essay  on  Chillingworth  "  in  Dr.  A.  Barry's  Masters  in  English  Theology. 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  115 

to  make  every  lesson  he  teaches  so  plain  that  it  cannot 
be  missed.  Great  moral  principles,  with  their  limitless 
breadth  of  scope  and  infinite  variety  of  application,  cannot 
be  imparted  in  any  such  form.  Few  errors  have  been  more 
insidious  and  hurtful  than  that  embalmed  by  common  con- 
sent in  the  innocent-looking  phrase  "the  simple  Gospel." 
The  Gospel  is  not  a  superficial  and  easily  mastered  scheme 
of  salvation,  or  a  system  of  life  and  thought  in  any  sense 
implied  in  these  words,  but  a  profoundly  heart-searching 
spiritual  discipline  from  first  to  last.  Jesus  purposely 
placed  many  precious  truths  where  they  could  not  be  got 
at  without  self-denying  exertion,  hiding  them  deep,  like 
the  "treasure  hid  in  a  field," which  had  to  be  sought  for  and 
obtained  at  a  self-bankrupting  cost.  The  moral  and  spirit- 
ual advantages  he  offers  to  his  followers  are  great  and 
abiding,  but  the  ground  taken  in  the  conditions  is  exacting 
and  high.  "  This  is  a  hard  saying,  who  can  hear  it  ? "  has 
been  murmured  more  than  once  by  the  timid  and  doubtful 
on  the  threshold  of  his  kingdom,  as  in  the  instance  of  the 
admiring  scribe  who,  yielding  to  a  passing  spasm  of  convic- 
tion, offered  to  embark  with  the  company  of  the  apostles  only 
to  have  his  enthusiasm  cooled  by  quiet  reminder  of  the 
cost,  or  in  that  of  the  amiable  young  Croesus  who,  drawn 
perhaps  by  sympathy  with  some  single  and  conspicuous 
feature  of  Christ's  character,  came  to  him  "  running "  to 
"  wa/k  away  sorrowful." 

It  is  true  Jesus  invites  men  to  himself  that  he  may  lighten 
their  burdens  and  commit  to  them  the  golden  secret  of  a 
deep  and  enduring  spiritual  repose.  But  the  moral  and  in- 
tellectual discipline  he  imposes  is  really  not  lighter,  but 
severer,  more  difficult,  more  continuous,  than  that  required 
by  other  professed  masters  of  the  human  mind.  "  Strait  is 
the  gate,  "  he  said,  "  and  narrow  is  the  way  that  leadeth 
unto  life,  and  few  there  be  that  find  it."*      "The  Mosaic 

♦  Matu  vii,  14. 


116  Ecce  Clems 

law,"  says  a  judicious  writer,  "says  exactly  what  it  means  ; 
you  have  only  to  take  it  and  obey  it ;  but  the  Sermon  on 
the  Mount  sets  a  man  thinking ;  it  perplexes,  it  often 
baffles ;  it  is  only  by  patient  effort  to  appreciate  its  spirit 
that  it  can  be  reduced  to  practice.  The  same  is  true  of  the 
parables  which  our  Lord  used  to  teach  the  people.  They 
stimulate  thought,  they  suggest  principles,  they  arrest  the 
attention,  but  they  do  not  give  men  spiritual  information  in 
the  easiest  and  most  direct  form.  Our  Lord,  then,  taught, 
and  especially  taught  his  disciples,  so  as  to  train  their 
character  and  stimulate  their  intelligences  ;  he  worked  to 
make  them  intelligent  sons  and  friends,  not  obedient  slaves. 
He  would  have  them  set  ends  above  means  and  principles 
above  ordinances,  as  when  he  said,  "The  Sabbath  was 
made  for  man,  not  man  for  the  Sabbath."  Speaking  else- 
where of  the  practical  genius  of  Christianity,  the  same  writer 
says:  "  It  is  not  satisfied  that  one  or  two  of  the  Christian 
community  should  do  the  positive  work  of  religion  for  the 
rest.  It  desires  to  see  the  whole  community  an  organized 
body  in  active  cooperation,  a  royal  priesthood  in  conse- 
crated service.  It  is  because  it  thus  desires  to  enlist  all 
men  and  the  whole  man  in  positive  service  that  the  best 
kind  of  authority  refuses  to  do  too  much  for  men,  refuses  to 
be  too  explicit,  too  complete,  too  clear,  lest  it  should  dwarf 
instead  of  stimulating  their  higher  faculties."  * 

5*  Pacifex  Maximus. 

But  now,  if  Christ  be  regarded  as  preeminently  the 
Teacher  of  his  Church,  his  own  presentation  of  himself  as 
our  sacrifice  for  sin  and  Saviour  from  its  guilt,  penalty,  and 
power  must  necessarily  occupy  a  place  in  the  ministry  he 
has  instituted  corresponding  to  the  prominence  it  held  in 
his  own  mind  as  the  consummation  of  his  earthly  mission 
and  the  realization  of  God's  redeeming  purpose.     As  the 

•  Dr.  Gore's  Incarnation  of  the  Son  of  God,  lecture  vii. 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  117 

revealer  of  God  to  men  he  bears  witness  to  the  truth.* 
And  the  truth  is  the  fan  in  his  hand  wherewith  he  purgeth 
his  threshing  floor.  It  sifts  men's  motives,  tests  the  depth, 
strength,  sincerity,  of  their  attachments,  sometimes  disclos- 
ing a  lamentable  failure  of  faith  and  courage,  sometimes  a 
positive  alienation  of  the  heart  from  all  goodness.  The 
chaff  yields  to  the  breeze,  and  the  solid  grain  attests  its  own 
weight  and  worth  by  keeping  its  place  on  the  threshing- 
floor.  An  ill-considered  profession  of  discipleship  like  that 
of  the  scribe  who  said,  "  Master,  I  will  follow  thee  whither- 
soever thou  goest,"  is  met  by,  "  The  foxes  have  holes,  and 
birds  of  the  air  have  winter  shelters,  but  the  Son  of  man 
hath  not  where  to  lay  his  head."  After  the  searching  dis- 
course on  the  "  Bread  of  Heaven,"  and  his  strong  insist- 
tence  on  the  superior  claims  of  the  spiritual  life,  "many 
of  his  disciples  went  back  and  walked  no  more  with  him." 
Even  the  inner  circle  of  the  twelve  began  to  show  signs  of 
wavering,  and  he  asked,  with  a  blending  of  rebuke  and 
tenderness  in  his  tone,  "Will  ye  also  go  away  ?  "  To  which 
Peter  answered,  "  To  whom  shall  we  go  ?  Thou  hast  the 
words  of  eternal  life."  It  required  the  impersonation  of  the 
truth  in  Christ  to  make  it  acceptable  and  welcome  even  to 
the  noblest  and  most  candid  minds.  Standing  alone,  as 
an  abstraction,  truth  is  hard  and  exacting  and  tends  to 
repel.  It  is  Sinai  covered  with  blackness  and  darkness  and 
tempest,  and  reverberating  with  the  voice  of  words.  Em- 
bodied in  a  gracious  personality  by  whose  spirit  and  action 
it  is  made  lovely,  by  whose  tone  of  sympathy  and  love  its 
harshest  notes  are  made  sweet  and  musical,  by  whose  self- 
sacrificing  death  its  lofty  claims  become  invested  with  the 
highest  of  all  sanctions,  it  impresses  and  attracts.  Where 
Christ's  utterance  of  the  naked  truth  tended  to  repel  men 
his  personality  of  perfect  love  held  them  in  thrall.  In  him 
sovereignty  and  fatherhood,  truth  and   love,  necessity  and 

♦  Joha  xviii,  37. 


118  Ecce  Clerus 

freedom,  moral  self-surrender  and  spiritual  triumph,  found 
their  point  of  coincidence  and  reconciliation  when  "he  suf- 
fered to  the  lowest  bent  of  weakness  in  the  flesh  and 
triumphed  to  the  highest  pitch  of  glory  in  the  spirit."  The 
truth  as  the  transcript  of  God's  holy  nature  demanded  rec- 
ognition of  its  unabated  claims ;  but  human  nature  without 
the  awakening  of  some  deeper  motive  than  it  had  heretofore 
known  was  unequal  to  that  demand.  The  Teacher  of  truth 
must  bear  the  cross,  must  sacrifice  himself  for  those  who 
have  hopelessly  lost  the  precious  secret;  and  his  sacrifice, 
unlike  the  willing  martyrdoms  of  his  followers,  which  illu- 
mine with  a  supernal  splendor  some  of  the  darkest  periods 
of  history,  must  be  equal  to  and  worthy  of  the  truth  it 
is  offered  to  attest.  He  who  would  uphold  and  honor  the 
law  and  yet  show  mercy  to  lawbreakers  must  needs  die  for 
those  whose  acquittal  and  salvation  he  would  secure.  As 
Longfellow  beautifully  says : 

The  depths  of  love  are  atonement's  depths.* 

"Thus  it  behooved  Christ  to  suffer  and  to  rise  from  the 
dead  the  third  day,"  was  his  own  explanation,  to  his  bewil- 
dered disciples,  of  what  had  happened,  when  the  tragedy  was 
completed,  "  and  that  repentance  and  remission  of  sins 
should  be  proclaimed  in  his  liame  among  all  nations,  begin- 
ning at  Jerusalem."  The  cross  of  Christ,  as  the  central  fact 
in  the  history  of  the  race,  has  had  an  incalculable  influence  on 
the  destiny  of  individuals  and  nations,  and  has,  to-day  more 
than  ever,  an  inexhaustible  interest  and  significance  for  hu- 
man thought.  It  is  the  Pacifex  Maximus,  "the  grand  re- 
solvent of  all  difficulties;  "  and  the  preacher  who  discerns 
not  the  paramount  value  and  importance  of  it  and  of  the 
truths  which  grow  out  of  it,  or  stand  intimately  related  to  it, 
and  employs  the  time  and  attention  of  his  people  to  discuss 
questions  of  the  hour — transitory  problems  which  change 

♦  "Children  of  the  Last  Supper." 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  119 

complexion  almost  while  he  is  in  the  act  of  speaking  of 
them — is  surely  "blind  and  cannot  see  afar  off."  Says  a 
thoughtful  American  preacher,  after  naming  questions  suffi- 
cient, if  attention  were  given  them,  to  occupy  nearly  all 
the  fifty-two  Sundays  in  the  calendar — "  the  money  question, 
the  tariff  question,  the  tenement  question,  the  labor  ques- 
tion, the  immigrant  question,  the  agricultural  question,  the 
tramp  question,  the  war  question,  the  Afro-American  ques- 
tion, the  Roman  Catholic  question,  the  education  question, 
the  municipal  question,  the  woman  question,  the  geological 
question,  the  descent-of-man  question,  the  inspiration-of- 
Scripture  question,  the  immortality  question,  and  a  host  of 
others  that  need  not  be  named  " — "  I  confess  I  have  been 
at  times  much  depressed  with  my  inability  to  solve  them 
satisfactorily;  .  .  .  yet  in  all  my  perplexity  and  regret  one 
thing  has  stood  forth  in  my  consciousness,  the  incarnation 
of  the  Son  of  God,  the  crucifixion  of  the  Son  of  man.  The 
cross  of  Christ  seems  to  come  nearer  and  nearer  to  my  eyes 
and  to  sink  deeper  and  deeper  into  my  soul,  and  there  grows 
up  in  me  a  conviction  .  .  .  that  the  cross  is  the  one  thing 
in  all  the  world  that  it  is  necessary  for  me  to  know  and  un- 
derstand ;  that  on  the  knowledge  and  the  understanding  of 
the  meaning  of  Jesus  Christ  crucified  the  answers  to  all  the 
world's  hard  questions  can  be  given,  not  fully,  perhaps,  but 
sufficiently  for  the  daily  needs  of  the  life  of  mankind.  I 
am  convinced  as  well  for  myself  as  for  you  and  others  that 
we  do  not  give  the  proper  attention  to  the  central  fact  of 
God's  revelation  of  himself  to  man  in  the  person  of  his  Son. 
We  let  our  minds  be  diverted  from  the  crucifixion — that 
great  tragedy  of  evil  and  yet  victory  of  love,  that  event  in 
which  all  the  interests  of  the  world  met,  by  which  all  the 
questionsof  mankind  were  answered — and  we  fix  them  on  the 
things  that  lie  in  the  shadows  of  Calvary,  the  things  that  long 
were  put  to  flight  by  the  outcome  of  its  power."* 

•  Prall's  Civic  Christianity,  p.  i8i. 


120  Ecce  Clerus 

"  But  even  were  it  practicable,  would  it  be  wise,"  it 
might  be  asked  "in  these  days,  when  to  a  degree  unknown  in 
any  previous  age  the  life  of  man  is  touched  on  so  many 
sides  and  his  mind  and  character  influenced  by  a  hundred 
different  topics,  for  any  public  teacher  to  confine  himself  to 
the  one  theme  of  Christ  and  his  salvation  ?  Even  if  it  be 
admitted,  as  Horace  Bushnell  said,  that  *  the  soul  of  all  im- 
provement is  the  improvement  of  the  soul,'  is  not  said  im- 
provement of  the  soul  a  very  complex  affair  ?  Does  it  not 
involve  the  promotion  of  science,  the  progress  of  art,  the 
growth  of  literature,  the  study  of  social  and  economic  ques- 
tions and  attention  to  politics  and  government — municipal 
and  national — as  well  as  to  questions  of  international  policy, 
law,  and  jurisprudence  ?  And  can  any  man  have  a  compre- 
hensive idea  of  human  well-being  or  contribute  what  he 
ought  to  promote  it  who  rigidly  confines  his  sympathy  and 
interest  to  religion  and  religious  truths  ?  " 

To  this  the  answer  is  that,  while  confining  himself,  in  the 
pulpit,  as  the  ambassador  of  Christ,  to  those  truths  and  con- 
siderations which  go  to  the  very  taproot  of  all  the  evils  which 
afflict  society  and  hurt  the  individual — truths  which  touch 
the  springs  of  thought  and  motive  more  deeply  than  any- 
thing else  can,  inspiring  men  with  those  ideals,  energies,  and 
hopes  which  are  ever  the  great  factors,  alike  of  civil  and 
religious  progress — the  Christian  minister  ought  to  seize 
every  opportunity  as  a  citizen  and  a  friend  of  humanity  to 
lighten  the  burden  of  labor,  to  multiply  the  consolations  of 
poverty,  to  promote  purity,  sobriety,  industry,  thrift,  and 
general  enlightenment,  and  advance  and  support  the  prin- 
ciples of  good  government.  While  so  preaching  the  doc- 
trine of  the  cross  as  to  make  it  clear  that  "  its  significance 
is  broader,  deeper,  higher  than  all  the  thought  of  man,  be- 
cause its  height,  and  depth,  and  width  are  conterminous 
with  the  love  of  Jesus  Christ,  which  is  the  love  of  the  infi- 
nite and  eternal  God,"  his  personal  example,  active  sym- 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  121 

pathies  and  general  attitude  toward  great  public  questions 
ought  to  be  the  best  practical  illustration  of  the  reality  and 
power  of  the  truth  he  proclaims. 

6»  Pkdge  of  out  Completed  Manhood, 

And  just  as  the  problems  of  history  and  of  individual 
life  find  their  best  and  fullest  solution  in  the  death  of  Christ, 
so  the  completion  and  coronation  of  our  manhood  are 
guaranteed  by  his  resurrection.  Through  him  comes  the 
hope  that  "  this  corruptible  shall  put  on  incorruption,  and 
this  mortal  immortality  " — the  confidence  that  when  "  the 
earthly  house  of  our  tabernacle  is  dissolved  we  have  a  build- 
ing from  God,  a  house  not  made  with  hands,  eternal  in  the 
heavens."*  By  his  cross  sin  is  atoned,  for  and  its  power 
broken  ;  by  his  resurrection  faith  is  confirmed,  and  death 
and  the  grave,  which  are  the  natural  and  instinctive  aver- 
sion of  all  healthy  minds,  become  the  royal  road  to  the  prom- 
ised glory.  To  the  most  enlightened  and  most  cheerful  of 
ancient  peoples  Death  was  the  most  inexorable  of  adversa- 
ries, in  whose  presence  the  aid  of  both  gods  and  men  was 
unavailing,  and  from  whose  unrelenting  grasp  there  was  no 
escape.  He  is  the  only  one  among  the  gods  who  regards 
no  gifts  and  has  no  altars,  and  to  whom  no  paeans  are  sung.f 
"It  is  not  right  for  me  to  behold  the  dead,"|  Eurpides 
makes  the  goddess  Artemis  say  to  the  dying  Hippolytus  as 
she  prepares  to  leave  him  to  shift  for  himself  in  the  final 
struggles  of  mortality.  She  may  not  stain  her  pure,  godlike 
vision,  she  explains,  with  the  sight  of  deathlike  expirations. 
Homer  in  the  Odyssey  makes  Ulysses  congratulate  Achilles 
on  his  supremacy  and  power  in  the  under  world  or  "land  of 

*  I  Cor.  V,  I. 

t  Lessing,  in  the  Laocoon,  quotes  from  iEschylus  the  line 
OvS"  loTL  (iufihq  ov6e  nmuvit^erai. 

X      ifiol  yap  ov  dsfit^  (pdiToiig  opav 

ov6'  ofifxa  xpatveiv  davaai[ioLaiv  ek  ttvocuq 

dpu  de  a'  rj6r)  rovde  ir^^rjaiov  kukov. — Hippol.,  v.  1437. 


122  Ecce  Clerus 

the  Cimmerian  men,"  but  the  noble  Greek  finds  life  in  the 
world  of  shades  so  empty,  poor,  and  pitiless  that  he  scorn- 
fully rejects  the  well-meant  consolations  of  his  living  friend 
and  expresses  his  very  decided  preference  for  the  meanest 
and  most  miserable  pauper's  lot  in  the  world  of  the  living 
to  the  princeliest  place  and  power  in  the  realm  of  the 
dead,*  Such  were  men's  views  of  death  and  of  the  state  of 
being  beyond  its  dark  veil  before  the  "  Day-star  "  arose  in 
their  hearts  and  the  thick  mists  were  lifted  from  everlast- 
ing scenes  by  Him  who 

Captive  led  captivity. 
And  robbed  the  grave  of  victory 
And  took  the  sting  from  death. 

And  apart  from  faith  in  the  Risen  One  the  eternal  out- 
look is  as  gloomy  and  forbidding  as  ever.  "  What  went 
before  me  and  what  will  follow  me,"  says  one  of  the  most 
refined  and  most  scholarly  of  modern  skeptics,  "  I  regard 
as  two  black,  impenetrable  curtains  hanging  down  at  the 
two  extremities  of  human  life  and  which  no  living  man 
has  yet  drawn  aside.  Many  hundreds  of  generations  have 
stood  between  these  curtains  with  their  torches,  guessing 
anxiously  what  lies  behind.  On  the  curtain  of  futurity 
many  see  the  shadows  of  themselves,  the  forms  of  their  own 
passions  enlarged  and  put  in  motion,  and  they  shrink  back 
in  terror  at  this  image  of  themselves.  Poets,  philosophers, 
and  founders  of  States  have  painted  this  curtain  with  their 
dreams,  more  smiling  or  more  dark  as  the  sky  above  them 
was  cheerful  or  gloomy,  and  their  pictures  deceive  the  eye 
when  viewed  from  a  distance.  Many  jugglers,  too,  make 
profit  out  of  this  our  universal  curiosity ;  by  their  strange 
mummeries  they  have  set  the  outstretched  fancy  in  amaze- 
ment. A  deep  silence  reigns  behind  this  curtain.  No  one 
once  within  will  answer  those  he  has  left  without.  All  you 
can    hear   is  the  hollow  echo  of  your  question    as   if  you 

*  Odyssey,  book  xi,  474. 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  123 

shouted  in  a  cavern."*  Thus  sad  is  the  plight  and  pre- 
dicament and  comfortless  and  cold  the  confession  of  mod- 
ern skeptical  philosophy.  With  this  depressing  note  of  de- 
spair it  is  the  noble  privilege  of  the  proclaimer  of  "  Jesus 
and  the  Resurrection  "  to  contrast  the  bright  and  exhilarat- 
ing hope  of  "  the  Gospel  of  the  grace  of  God."  By  him 
who  brought  life  and  incorruptibility  to  light  the  "black, 
impenetrable  curtain  "  of  materialism  is  rent  in  twain  from 
the  top  to  the  bottom.  "  I  commend  you  to  the  care  of 
divine  Providence,"  wrote  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson,  in  bid- 
ding affectionate  farewell  to  his  parish  in  the  city  of  Boston, 
in  1832,  "  May  he  multiply  to  your  families  and  your  per- 
sons early  genuine  blessings  and  whatever  discipline  may 
be  appointed  to  you  in  this  life,  may  the  blessed  hope  of 
the  resurrection  which  he  has  planted  in  the  human  soul 
and  confirmed  and  manifested  in  Jesus  Christ  be  made 
good  to  you  beyond  the  grave." 

7.  ^Ouf  Most  "Worthy  Judge  Eternal.'^ 

Once  more  :  As  the  risen  Redeemer  of  men  and  Perfecter 
of  their  souls,  whose  sphere  of  mediatorial  activity  is  the  in- 
visible realm  of  thought,  will,  conscience,  and  affection, 
Christ  is  also  the  only  sure  discerner  of  spirits  and  the  only 
competent  arbiter  of  human  destiny.  His  assumption  of 
our  nature  made  him  perfectly  familiar  with  all  the  most 
trying  situations  of  our  life  and  with  all  the  deeper  prob- 
lems of  the  soul.  All  the  essential  elements  of  our  proba- 
tion found  their  burning  focal  point  in  his  personal  con- 
sciousness. His  experience  was  full,  comprehensive,  and 
varied  enough  to  be  typical  and  to  provide  the  clew  for  an 
accurate  and  just  judgment  of  every  man's  character  and 
desert.  It  gave  him  in  his  own  personality  a  standard  in 
which  spotless  purity  and  perfect  pity,  truth  and  tender- 
ness, justice  and  mercy,  meet  and  blend.     "  He  was  tempted 

*  G.  J.  Holyoake's,  Logic  of  Death. 


124  Ecce  Clerus 

in  all  points  like  as  we  are,  yet  without  sin."  He  learned 
obedience  by  the  things  which  he  suffered.  "  For  it  be- 
came him,  for  whom  are  all  things,  and  through  whom  are 
all  things,  in  bringing  many  sons  unto  glory,  to  make  the 
author  of  their  salvation  perfect  through  suffering."  Hence 
to  him  are  given  "the  keys  of  Hades  and  of  death,  and  he 
is  ordained  to  be  the  judge  of  quick  and  dead.  In  his 
glorified  manhood  men  will  see  themselves  approved  or 
condemned  according  as  they  have  assimilated  to  or  de- 
generated from  the  divine  ideal  embodied  in  the 'Son  of 
man.*  " 

Within  the  cycle  of  truths  thus  briefly  outlined,  dominated 
by  the  love  of  God  as  revealed  in  Christ  and  appropriately 
designated  the  good  news  {rd  evayyeXiov) ^  minds  the  most 
refined  and  most  cultivated,  and  minds  narrow  and  undis- 
ciplined, find  ample  room  to  roam,  and  hearts  laden  with 
sin,  sorrow,  and  anxiety  find  exhaustless  springs  of  consola- 
tion. Beyond  this  there  is  no  need  to  travel.  "  A  Chris- 
tian preacher  ought  to  preach  Christ  alone  and  all  things  in 
him  and  of  him.  If  he  find  a  dearth  in  this  ;  if  it  seem  to 
him  a  circumscription,  he  does  not  know  Christ  as  the 
TT^^pufia — the  fullness.  It  is  not  possible  that  there  should 
be  aught  true  or  seemly  or  beautiful  in  thought,  word,  or 
deed,  speculative  or  practical,  which  may  not  and  which 
ought  not  to  be  evolved  out  of  Christ  and  the  faith  in  Christ; 
no  folly,  no  error,  no  evil  to  be  exposed  or  warned  against 
which  may  not  and  should  not  be  convicted  and  denounced 
for  its  contrariance  and  enmity  to  Christ.  To  the  Christian 
preacher  Christ  should  be  in  all  things  and  all  things  in 
Christ;  he  should  abjure  every  argument  which  is  not  a  link 
in  the  chain  of  which  Christ  is  the  staple  and  the  staple 

*  99    Jit 

ring.    * 

Beyond  the  group  of  vital  and  saving  verities  of  which 
Christ  is  the  source,  center,  and  subject,  the  Spirit  of  God  re- 

•  R.  W.  Church,  in  Masters  in  English  Theology,  edited  by  Dr.  A.  Barry. 


The  Theme  of  Preaching  125 

fuses  to  bear  witness ;  for  he  is  only  concerned  to  teach,  dem- 
onstrate, attest,  and  administer  the  truths  which  relate  to 
him  "  who  through  the  eternal  Spirit  offered  himself  without 
spot  to  God,  that  he  might  purge  your  conscience  from  dead 
works  to  serve  the  living  God;  "  he  witnesses  only  to  the 
things  of  Christ,  and  he  who  is  ever  eager  to  escape  from 
the  inspiring  and  exhaustless  theme  of  Christ  and  his  salva- 
tion is  doomed  to  a  ministry  of  sterility  and  failure.  Once 
away  from  this  center  of  light  and  solace  the  preacher  is 
like  the  camels  which  bore  the  dead  body  of  the  distin- 
guished Jewish  scholar,  philosopher,  physician,  and  rabbi, 
Maimonides,  across  the  Egyptian  desert  from  Cairo  to  Tibe- 
rias. It  is  said  that  the  noble  animals  on  leaving  the  tomb 
traveled  round  and  round,  in  a  wide  circle,  till,  hungry  and 
exhausted  with  their  wanderings,  they  dropped  down  and 
died.  The  man  who  abandons  that  deep  and  inexhaust- 
ible fountain  of  salvation — Christ  and  him  crucified — to  dis- 
course on  topics  of  limited  range  and  ephemeral  interest 
hews  out  for  himself  and  for  his  people  "broken  cisterns 
that  will  hold  no  water."  He  spends  "money  for  that 
which  is  not  bread,  and  labors  for  that  which  satisfieth  not." 
He  wanders  in  waste  places,  fertile  only  in  disappointment 
and  despair. 


126  Ecce  Clerus 


CHAPTER  VI 
The  Btigbear  of  the  Present-day  Evangfelical  Pulpit 

The  prevalence  of  doubt  about  all  truths  and  to  some  extent,  also,  the  general 
eagerness  of  preachers  to  find  out  and  meet  the  people's  desires  and  demands, 
these  two  causes  together  have  created  the  impression  that  the  ministry  had 
DO  certain  purposes  or  definite  message  ;  that  the  preacher  was  a  promiscuous 
caterer  for  men's  whims,  wishing  them  well,  inspired  by  a  general  benevolence, 
but  in  DO  sense  a  prophet  uttering  positive  truth  to  them  which  they  did 
not  know  before,  uttering  it  whether  they  liked  it  or  hated  it.  Is  not  that 
the  impression  many  young  men  have  of  the  ministry  ? — Bishop  Phillips 
Brooks. 

I  have  said  preach  plainly  and  preach  earnestly  ;  I  now  say  preach  with 
moral  courage.  Fear  no  man,  high  or  low,  rich  or  poor,  taught  or  untaught. 
Honor  all  men  ;  love  all  men  ;  but  feair  none.  Speak  what  you  account  great 
truths  frankly,  strongly,  boldly.  .  ,  .  Put  faith  in  truth  as  mightier  than 
error,  prejudice,  or  passion,  and  be  ready  to  take  a  place  among  its  martyrs. — 
William  E.  Channing's  Advice  to  a  Preacher. 

\*  An  Important  Question* 

"Is  the  doctrine  of  future  retribution  neglected  by  the 
evangelical  pulpit  of  our  day  ?  If  so,  why  ?  "  was  the  ques- 
tion the  present  writer  was  asked  to  introduce  at  the  fort- 
nightly meeting  of  a  large  association  of  evangelical  min- 
isters of  all  denominations  in  an  old  and  beautiful  New 
England  city  a  few  years  ago.  Interest  in  the  subject  was 
evinced  by  a  much  larger  attendance  than  usual,  and  the 
opening  essay  was  followed  by  a  warm  and  general  discus- 
sion. In  the  absence  of  the  laity  and  of  reporters  (by  a  rule 
of  the  association)  a  full  and  free  expression  of  opinion 
was  elicited,  and  a  much  wider  diversity  of  view  was 
disclosed  than  anyone  anticipated.  Even  men  who  had 
labored  side  by  side  for  years,  and  esteemed  each  other 
to  be   veritable  Abdiels   in  loyalty    to  evangelical    truth, 


Bugbear  of  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit     127 

and  each  other's  pulpits  to  be  faces  et  foci — the  fires  and 
the  hearthstones — of  orthodox  zeal,  seemed  surprised  at 
the  wide  departure  from  the  recognized  and  traditional 
faith  of  their  respective  denominations  as  to  "  last  things  " 
{ja  laxO'Ta)  which  the  discussion  brought  to  light.  One 
thing  was  clear  :  a  large  landslide  from  the  old  lines  of 
teaching  on  the  subject  of  eschatology  had  taken  place,  al- 
most without  anyone  being  aware  of  it,  beyond  a  vague 
feeling  that  the  doubt  and  uncertainty  of  one's  own  mind 
were  only  a  part  of  the  general  consciousness.  One  spoke  of 
the  inevitable  recoil  from  the  harsher  features  of  Calvinism, 
and  read  copious  extracts  from  Jonathan  Edwards's  sermon 
on  "  Sinners  in  the  Hands  of  an  Angry  God;"  which  he  had 
raked  from  the  "dustheap  of  oblivion,"  or  picked  from 
some  "wormhole  of  long-vanished  time."  Another  pastor 
of  venerable  aspect  eloquently  emphasized  the  instinctive 
shrinking,  from  every  form  of  pain,  that  is  so  marked  a  char- 
acteristic of  the  age.  A  third  pointed  out  what  he  con- 
sidered a  growing  conviction  of  the  essential  weakness  of  all 
appeals  to  an  inferior  order  of  motives,  such  as  fear,  self- 
love,  other-worldly  prudence.  Several  nodded  a  vigorous  as- 
sent to  the  old  position  who  did  not  speak,  while  Sweden- 
borgians  present  and  Adventists  of  various  shades  of  opinion 
seized  the  occasion  to  exhibit  the  superiority  of  their  re- 
spective theories  of  "  the  world  to  come."  The  argument 
of  the  paper,  which  was  commended  in  terms  which  the 
writer  felt  to  be  hardly  warranted,  was  not  discussed  at  all, 
on  its  merits,  except  by  one  or  two.  Feeling  after  the  lapse 
of  several  years  an  increasing  conviction  of  the  gravity  and 
importance  of  the  question  for  the  pulpit  of  to-day,  the  au- 
thor ventures  to  insert  the  essay  here  substantially  as  it  was 
read  before  the  association,  but  supplemented  with  some 
references  to  present-day  developments  of  opinion.  An  ex- 
haustive and  complete  discussion  of  the  problem  it  did  not 
then,  and  does  not  now,  pretend  to  be. 


128  Ecce  Clems 

2.  Significance  and  Bearings  of  the  Inquiry* 

The  question  which  forms  the  subject  of  this  paper  is  one 
very  difficult  for  a  minister  in  harness  to  answer  with  any 
degree  of  confidence.  Working  up  to  the  collar  all  the 
time,  as  most  of  us  are  doing;  wholly  preoccupied  with 
the  manifold  and  various  duties  that  daily  claim  attention 
and  thought,  with  no  inclination  to  meddle  with  other  men's 
affairs,  and  with  very  few  opportunities  of  hearing  each  other 
preach,  how  shall  anyone  say  what  doctrines  are  regularly 
taught  from  evangelical  pulpits  ?  in  what  relative  proportion 
taught  ?  and  according  to  what  rule  of  theological  perspec- 
tive ?  And  what  are  neglected — consigned  to  that  limbo, 
large  and  broad,  in  which  things  transitory  and  vain  only 
should  be  received  ?  The  very  fact,  however,  that  this  ques- 
tion is  suggested  by  an  association  of  evangelical  pastors 
must  be  allowed  to  have  its  own  significance.  Men  do  not 
pause  and  deliberately  and  anxiously  propound  such  in- 
quiries without  sufficient  reason.  The  question  is  a  solil- 
oquy in  which  the  soliloquist  challenges  his  own  faith  and 
courage  aloud,  and  such  challenge,  unprovoked  by  charge  or 
insinuation  from  any  hostile  source,  always  creates  suspicion 
of  a  condition  of  unsettledness  and  unrest  in  the  mind  of 
the  questioner.  By  the  first  interrogatory  the  allegation  of 
neglect  is  tacitly  admitted,  and  in  the  second  a  hint  is  given 
not  of  rebuttal,  but  only  of  condonement  or  justification. 
The  mere  mooting  of  such  an  inquiry  then,  taken  in  con- 
junction with  the  general  trend  of  modern  religious  thought, 
and  especially  the  prevailing  tone  and  character  of  present- 
day  eschatological  literature,  is  our  warrant  for  concluding, 
without  attempt  at  formal  proof,  that  the  doctrine  of  last 
things  has  been  allowed  to  drop  out  of  its  proper  place  in  a 
true  perspective  of  Christian  teaching.  We  do  not  openly 
'  disavow  our  faith  in  a  "  wrath  to  come  "  {jiiXXovaa  bgyq). 
We  offer  no  argument  for  its  disproof.  We  are  simply 
afraid  of  it  as  an  item  of  Christian  doctrine,  and  are  willing 


Bugbear  of  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit     129 

to  contribute  toward  its  painless  extinction  by  taking  part 
in  a  conspiracy  of  silence  against  it.  There  are  doubtless 
exceptions  to  the  truth  of  this  statement,  but  it  is  believed 
they  are  notably  few. 

As  to  the  causes  which  have  led  to  this  uncertainty  and 
hesitation  of  the  religious  mind  in  regard  to  an  important 
article  of  Christian  faith,  it  is  much  easier  to  say  what  they 
are  not  than  what  they  are.  We  shall  endeavor,  however, 
to  state  them  both  negatively  and  positively. 

3.  Doctrine  of  Future  Retribution,  no  Figment  of  the  Mediaeval  Fancy. 

The  evangelical  pulpit  of  to-day  is  not  silent  as  to  the 
eternal  fate  of  the  finally  lost,  because,  as  has  often  been 
erroneously  alleged,  the  doctrine  of  future  punishment  is 
discovered  to  be  a  figment  of  the  mediaeval  imagination. 
The  early  creeds  of  the  Church  up  to  the  Council  of  Nicsea 
are  simplicity  itself,  being  for  the  most  part  recitals  of  his- 
torical facts,  but  it  is  indisputable  that  the  hopeful  and  in- 
spiriting representation  of  the  eternal  state  of  the  just  has 
always  been  attended  by  this  foil — this  shadow  of  gloom  and 
despair  overhanging  the  ultimate  destiny  of  the  unsaved. 
If  Christian  thought  on  this  problem  during  the  last  few 
centuries  has  been  morbidly  apprehensive  and  fearful,  the 
distemper  which  afflicts  it  is  a  very  inveterate  one,  for  it  has 
been  inherited  from  the  very  earliest  ages  of  Catholic  Chris- 
tianity, as  the  writings  of  the  earliest  Christian  fathers 
clearly  show.* 

Nay,  it  has  a  deeper  seat  still.  It  is  inherent  in  our  in- 
tellectual constitution,  springing  from  a  far-reaching  psy- 
chological root  which  makes  our  whole  mental  experience  a 

*  Kal  Kpiaiv  Smaiav  ev  toIq  nam  notriaTjTai,  ra  fiev  irvevfiariKa.  rijq  novrj- 
piac  Kal  ayyeTiOvq  tovq  napapEfST/KOTag  /cat  h  aTroaTaaia  yeydvTaQ  Kal  Tovg 
aaejiElQ  Kal  aSUovg  Kal  avd/xovg  Kal  p}Ma(pTifiovg  tuv  avOpunuv  etc  to  aluviov 
nvp  nefiiprf. — Irenceus  Contr.  Hcer,,  lib.  i,  c.  ID,  §1. 

Et  judex  eorum,  qui  judicantur,  et  mittens  in  ignem  seternum  transfiguratores  veri- 
tates  et  contemtores  Patris  sui  et  adventus  ejus. — Contr,  Har.,  lib.  iii,  c.  4,  §  3. 

9 


130  Ecce  Clerus 

series  of  contrasts.  All  our  abstract  ideas  exist  in  pairs  and 
stand  over  against  each  other  in  sharp  antitheses.  We 
could  have  no  notion  of  high  without  low,  of  great  without 
small,  of  power  without  weakness,  of  pleasure  without  pain, 
of  sweet  without  bitter,  of  light  without  darkness,  of  rest 
without  labor,  of  holiness  without  sin,  of  order  without  con- 
fusion, of  good  without  evil,  of  heaven  without  hell.  No 
doubt  many  errors,  half  truths,  and  abnormities  in  philoso- 
phy, ethics,  and  religion  sprang  up  during  the  intellectually 
active  times  of  Erigena,  Scotus,  Bernard,  Abelard,  Anselm, 
and  Aquinas,  but  this  idea  of  a  world  of  eternally  lost  souls 
was  not  one  of  them.  '  The  clause  about  the  "  descent  into 
hell,"  indicating  Christ's  dominion  over  the  souls  in  prison, 
though  not  found  in  the  Apostles'  Creed  earlier  than  the 
age  of  Rufinus,  exists  in  one  or  other  of  its  forms — descendit 
ad  inferos,  vel  ad  infera,  vel  ad  infernal  vel  ad  infernum — 
in  many  early  symbols,  and  was  certainly  a  part  not  only  of 
premediaeval,  but  of  apostolic,  teaching.* 

4.  No  Lack  of  Definite  Statement  in  the  New  Testament. 

Nor  is  the  doctrine  of  a  "  wrath  of  God  revealed  from 
heaven  "f  neglected  because  it  is  not  definitely  and  fre- 
quently taught  in  Holy  Scripture.  The  magnitude  and 
gravity  of  the  problem,  the  solemn  and  far-reaching  issues 
that  depend  on  its  settlement,  call  for  care  and  exactness  in 
its  treatment,  and  demand  a  devout  sense  of  dependence  on 
the  eternal  Spirit,  whose  promised  light  and  guidance  alone 
can  secure  the  most  scholarly,  critical,  and  cautious  investi- 
gation against  erroneous  interpretation  of  the  inspired  word  ; 
but  the  limits  of  this  paper  do  not  admit  of  a  full  and  ex- 
haustive discussion  of  the  question  here.  We  will  only  say 
that  recent  attempts,  as  in  Row's  Eternal  Retribution,  for  ex- 
ample, and  very  recently  in  Dr.  Beet's  Last  Things,  to  elim- 

*  See  Hahn's  Bibliotkek  der  Symbole  und  Glaubensregeln  der  Allen  Kirche,  and 
Dr.  SchaflTs  Creeds  o/  Christendom.  t  Rom.  i,  i8. 


Bugbear  of  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit     131 

inate  the  idea  of  endless  duration  from  such  phrases  as  elg 
Tovg  aiibvag  rcbv  aloyvov,  to  the  ages  of  ages ;  XQ^^^''?  a,l(i)v[otg, 
through  times  eternal ;  aio)viog  deog,  the  eternal  God  ;  ^(t>rj 
atwvio^-,  eternal  life;  dXrjdgov  alcjvtov^  eternal  destruction; 
rd  TTVQ  TO  alojvtov,  the  fire  which  is  eternal,  taken  in  con- 
junction with  eig  r'qv  yeevvav  rov  irvpog,  into  the  Gehenna 
of  fire  ;  aloiviov  dixdprrjiia,  eternal  sin  ;  aia)viog  Kgioig,  eter- 
nal judgment ;  KoXaaig  alojviog,  eternal  punishment  ;  to 
■nvQ  TO  da(3eaTov^  the  fire  unquenchable — the  elimination 
from  these  and  similar  phrases  of  the  idea  of  a  proper  eternity- 
can  only  be  regarded  as  an  exhibition  of  pitiable  exegetical 
perversity.  For  though  it  cannot  be  denied  that  alddv  often 
signifies  an  age  or  dispensation  of  indefinite  limit,  and  that 
the  adjective  ai(l)viog,  formed  from  it,  often  has  a  similar 
signification,  it  is  equally  indisputable  that  aluviog,  as  ap- 
plied to  God  and  as  descriptive  of  the  future  condition  of 
saved  men  and  the  retribution  awaiting  the  finally  lost,  was 
intended  to  convey  the  notion  of  unending  duration — eter- 
nity proper — as  in  the  Timceus  of  Plato.* 

Something  must  be  grievously  wrong  when  the  stern  exi- 
gencies of  dogmatic  theory  require  the  rendering  of  such  a 
phrase  as  aXdviog  deog,  "  the  age-long  God."  What  does 
such  a  phrase  mean  ?  That  the  duration  of  God's  being, 
though  indefinitely  extended,  is  yet  bounded  by  limit? 
Strange  idea!  Yet  this  is  the  logical  and  inevitable  con- 
clusion if  the  rendering  of  Dr.  Beet  and  those  who  think 
with  him  is  legitimate.  How  can  deog^  the  name  of  a  Being 
who  is  essentially  self-existent,  eternal,  and  independent,  be 
qualified  by  an  epithet  which  strips  him  of  one  of  his  essen- 
tial and  necessary  attributes.''  The  phrase  "  age-long  God" 
contains  within  itself  an  obvious  contradiction.  And  yet  if 
this  ingenious  but  palpably  absurd  interpretation  breaks 
down,  the  second  probation  and  annihilation  theories  break 
down  along  with  it.     For  if  aidyviog  Beog  is  the  eternal  God 

*  Titn<eus,  38,  c.  38.    So  Lycur^us,  162,  24.    £<f  arcavTa  Tov  alava. 


132  Ecce  Clerus 

who  lives  (xQovoig  alwvloig)  through  times  eternal,  and  re- 
wards his  servants  with  eternal  life  {^(orj  alcjviog)  and,  pun- 
ishes those  who  are  found  guilty  of  eternal  sin  (alojviov 
dudgrTjfia)  with  eternal  destruction  (oXijdpov  alijviov)  in 
eternal  fire  {elg  to  nvp  to  aicjvcov),  which  is  not  annihila- 
tion either  swift  or  slow,  but  an  eternal  chastisement  [KdXaaig 
al(l)viog)  under  an  eternal  judgment  or  condemnation  {ditoviog 
Kpiotg)^  then  there  is  no  place  found  for  the  doctrine  of 
universal  restoration  or  of  conditional  immortality,  or  the 
theory  of  the  eternal  hope,  which,  after  all,  is  only  another 
name  for  everlasting  despair;  and,  curiously  enough,  even  Dr. 
Beet,  while  denying  the  natural  immortality  of  the  human 
soul,  admits  that  the  duration  of  the  penalty  reserved  for 
the  wicked  "extends  to  the  utmost  limit  of  man's  mental 
horizon,"  and  that  there  is  "no  ground  to  hope  that  the 
agony  of  the  lost  will  ever  cease."* 

If  the  original  Scriptures,  construed  according  to  strict 
grammatical  law  and  in  harmony  with  the  usus  loqtlendi  of 
the  writers,  are  to  decide  this  much-debated  question,  there 
is  no  escape  from  the  conclusion  that  men's  destiny  in  an- 
other  world  is  eternally  determined  by  their  character  and 
conduct  here,  and  that  as  no  peril  after  death  overshadows 
the  well-being  of  the  saved,  so  there  is  no  hope  of  deliver- 
ance— -post-mortem — for  the  finally  lost.  Both  good  and 
bad  reap  in  eternity  what  they  have  sown  in  time.  As  to 
what  that  future  harvest  is  there  is  no  dispute.  In  the  case 
of  the  "  holy  "  it  is  life  everlasting  actually  possessed  now; 
in  the  case  of  the  wicked  and  lawless  it  is  not  some  arbi- 
trarily inflicted  punishment,  but  the  natural  result  of  a  known 
law  working  now.  Men  live  by  law — "  the  law  of  the 
spirit  of  life  in  Christ  Jesus."  f  And  men  morally  degener- 
ate and  die  by  law — "  the  law  of  sin  and  death."  J  Scrip- 
ture simply  corroborates  and  confirms  the  inference  drawn 

*  See  the  further  discussion  of  this  point  in  Appendix  to  this  chapter. 

t  Rom,  viii,  2.  %  Rom.  viii,  2. 


Bugbear  of  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit     133 

from  the  facts  of  life,  "  that  sinful  character  means  retribu- 
tive character,  and  that  permanent  and  sinful  states  mean 
permanent  penal  states." 

The  fixed  and  eternal  doom  of  the  unrenewed  soul  is 
death  (ddvarog)  and  moral  corruption  {(pdopd) — the  inevi- 
table concomitant  and  consequence  of  death.  It  is  an  in- 
curable depravation  arising  from  a  hopeless  deprivation.  In 
the  God-abandoned  consciousness  of  the  hopelessly  cor- 
rupted and  lost  soul  the  worm  that  does  not  die  gnaws  and  the 
fire  which  is  not  quenched  burns.  In  enunciating  this  solemn 
fact  the  manifest  object  of  Jesus  is  not  to  gratify  our  curi- 
osity or  to  terrorize  our  minds  with  the  possibility  of  some  in- 
definite and  dread  calamity,  but  to  stimulate  us  to  a  right  use 
of  life  and  impress  us  with  a  due  sense  of  its  responsibility. 

5.  The  Doctrine  Essential  to  a  Complete  and  "Well-articulated  System 
of  Christian  Truth — Fourfold  Apocalypse. 

But  if  it  is  not  for  want  of  definite  inspired  authority  that 
the  pulpit  of  the  day  plays  the  part  of  a  muffled  drum  on 
this  most  solemn  question,  neither  is  it  because  of  its  non- 
essentiality  to  a  complete  and  thoroughly  articulated  system 
of  Christian  truth.  Christianity  is  essentially  a  revelation 
of  the  eternally  existent,  a  disclosure  {dnoKciXwpig)  of  cer- 
titudes. And  as  regards  the  future,  this  apocalypse  or  un- 
veiling is  distinctly  fourfold:  i.  There  is  to  be  an  unveil- 
ing of  the  glorified  Christ,  whose  kingly  majesty  here  was  hid- 
den, being  enshrined  in  our  lowly  human  form  and  obscured 
by  his  humiliation  and  sorrow  (i  Pet.  iv,  13).  2.  There  is 
to  be  an  unveiling  of  the  sons  of  God  {aTTOKaXinpig  to)v  vlcbv 
Qeov)^  whose  present  subjection  to  various  trials  and  temp- 
tations and  prejudgments  and  manifold  mortal  ills  con- 
ceals from  view  their  destined  royalty  and  blessedness 
(Rom.  viii,  19;  i  John  iii,  2).  3.  There  is  to  be  an  unveil- 
ing of  the  New  Economy  {oIkovhsvt]),  "  the  new  heavens 
and  new  earth  " — the  divinely  adjusted  environment  or  new 


134  Ecce  Clerus 

conditions  of  existence  which  are  to  conserve  and  enhance 
the  joy  of  those  who  have  demonstrated  their  desert  and 
capacity  for  blessedness  in  a  world  of  temptation,  sin,  and 
sorrow.  Accordingly  the  Christian  prophet  who  sees  the 
"  Holy  City,  New  Jerusalem,"  descending  out  of  heaven 
from  God,  prepared  as  a  bride  adorned  for  her  husband,  is 
the  author  of  an  apocalypse  (Rev.  xxi,  1-4).  4.  Lastly, 
there  is  to  be  an  apocalypse  "  in  the  day  of  wrath  "  {kv 
Tjfiipa  dpyrjg)  of  the  righteous  judgment  of  God,  who  will 
render  to  every  man  according  to  his  work  (Rom.  ii,  5,  6), 

Now,  these  apocalypses  are  integral  and  necessary  parts 
of  one  great  providential  scheme  of  the  future,  of  which 
the  whole  past  history  of  the  world,  with  its  drama  and 
melodrama,  tragedy  and  comedy,  trials  and  triumphs,  declen- 
sion and  advancement,  is  nothing  more  than  a  sort  of  pro- 
logue or  preparatory  rehearsal ;  and  such  is  the  vital  con- 
nection and  close  interdependence  of  these  several  disclo- 
sures that  to  omit  or  suppress  one  of  them  is  like  breaking 
a  link  in  a  chain.  It  dismembers  and  disturbs  the  entire 
system  of  revealed  truth  and  interrupts  the  gracious  pur- 
pose of  God.  While  theological  system  may  be  artificial 
and  arbitrary  in  its  arrangement,  its  several  parts  being  de- 
veloped, displaced,  or  even  dispensed  with  at  will,  as  has 
always  been  the  case  more  or  less,  no  such  method  can  be 
applied  without  serious  mischief  to  the  scheme  of  redemp- 
tion, which  grows  according  to  laws  of  its  own  like  a  "  tree 
of  life  "  out  of  the  nature  of  God.  Each  apocalypse  is  the 
unveiling  of  previously  existing  facts  ;  of  truths,  laws,  rela- 
tions that,  having  their  root  and  reason  in  Eternal  Being, 
cannot  be  altered,  but  become  successively  and  seasonably 
ripe  for  disclosure  like  the  leaves,  blossoms,  and  fruit  of  a 
tree. 

Now,  the  systematic  neglect  of  any  of  these  essential 
phases  of  the  divine  scheme  of  the  future  produces  a 
maimed  and  mutilated  type  of  Christianity,  and  presents  in 


Bugbear  of  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit     135 

place  of  the  God-given  evangel,  where  the  harshest  note  is 
essential  to  the  fullness  and  completeness  of  the  music,  a 
parod)^  and  a  caricature  which  requires  all  the  training, 
ability,  eloquence,  courage,  tact,  and  adroitness  a  man  can 
muster  to  save  it  from  becoming  jejune,  tedious,  and  tire- 
some to  the  common  mind  beyond  all  mortal  endurance. 
The  biographer  of  Paganini  tells  us  how,  when  playing 
before  a  large  and  critical  audience  in  Cremona,  the  home 
of  the  great  makers  and  masters  of  the  violin,  his  first  string 
broke.  The  musician,  with  the  dogged  pertinacity  and 
love  of  charlatanry  that  characterized  him  in  spite  of  his 
consummate  artistic  skill,  seemed  not  to  notice  the  mishap, 
but  proceeded  to  play  out  the  piece  on  three  strings.  But 
it  was  admitted  that,  while  the  performance  did  credit  to 
the  matchless  courage  and  incomparable  art  of  the  violinist,  it 
scarcely  did  equal  justice  to  the  music,  to  the  sweet-toned 
and  precious  Stradivarius  he  pressed  against  his  jaw,  or  to 
the  audience  which  had  come  expecting  not  so  much  to  see 
and  applaud  the  expertness  of  Paganini,  for  whom  personally 
the  people  of  Cremona  had  no  special  liking,  as  to  hear  the 
thrilling  strains  of  his  peerless  and  almost  perfect  music.  If 
Paganini  had  paused  and  secured  his  broken  string,  the  delay 
might  not  have  enhanced  his  fame,  but  what  the  performance 
would  have  lost  in  brilliance  and  bizarreness  the  music 
would  have  gained  in  fullness  and  harmony.  And  surely 
no  one  called  to  the  high  and  honorable  ambassadorship  of 
the  Gospel  ministry  can  afford  to  withhold  from  his  people 
from  any  motives  of  fear  or  prudence,  or  personal  ease  or 
prospect  of  temporary  advantage  of  any  kind,  what  he  has 
reason  to  believe  is  a  vital  item  in  the  divinely  inspired 
counsels  of  salvation. 

6.  No  Theodicy  in  Silence. 

Nor  is  there  to  our  mind  an  excuse  for  silence  in  the 
alleged  difficulty  of  reconciling  the  execution  of  eternal  pen- 


136  Ecce  Clenis 

ally  on  the  ultimately  lost  with  the  infinite  compassion  and 
goodness  of  God.  Those  who  really  feel  this  difficulty 
ought  to  find  it  at  an  earlier  stage,  namely,  in  the  introduc- 
tion and  continued  existence  of  sin  in  the  world.  The 
objection  squints  in  the  wrong  direction,  inasmuch  as  it 
looks  forward  instead  of  backward.  It  ought  to  be  dated 
from  the  point  where  the  great  epic  poet  begins  his  beauti- 
fully sad  and  tuneful  strain,  namely,  with 

Man's  first  disobedience  and  the  fruit 
Of  that  forbidden  tree,  whose  mortal  taste 
Brought  death  into  the  world  and  all  our  woe 
With  loss  of  Eden. 

The  greatest  evil  conceivable  is  not  the  suffering  which 
naturally  follows  sin,  but  the  sin  which  ever  leads  to  suffer- 
ing. And  this  is  true  whether  the  suffering  be  of  long  or 
of  short,  of  endless  or  limited,  duration.  Suffering  does  not 
corrupt  the  soul  and  atrophy  its  moral  powers,  but  sin  does. 
Nor  is  it  conceivable  that  to  a  moral  being,  whose  essential 
happiness  must  ever  largely  consist  in  the  sanity  and  free 
play  of  moral  faculty  and  function,  any  element  of  pain  or 
disaster  extraneous  to  the  soul  itself  can  materially  add  to 
that  essential  anguish  which  must  always  be  consequent  on 
its  own  self-chosen  or  self-caused  deterioration.  Singularly 
enough,  the  future  fate  of  lost  souls  is  described  as  a  harvest 
of  corruption — of  blasted  and  putrescent  grain — reaped  under 
the  domain  and  action  of  natural  law.*  We  look  around  us 
and  we  see  natures  as  noble  and  strenuous  as  our  own, 
capable  of  as  large  and  lasting  a  happiness  as  we  are  hoping 
ourselves  to  attain,  defiled,  degraded,  ruined,  by  the  giant 
vices  of  idleness,  intemperance,  lust,  the  love  of  mammon, 
etc.,  and  every  thoughtful  man  accustomed  to  look  beneath 
the  surface  of  things  feels  that  endless  pain,  as  such,  is 
nothing  compared  with  this  apparently  hopeless  and  eternal 
corruption   of  a   moral   and    responsible   being.     That    is 

*  Gal.  vi,  8. 


Bugbear  of  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit     137 

merely  the  shadow;  this  is  the  dark  substance  that  casts  it. 
That  is  an  accident  only;  this  is  the  essential  fact.  Yet 
this  ruin  wrought  by  sin  is  something  that  confronts  us 
every  day,  and  if  we  believe  in  the  existence  and  reign  of  a 
wise,  holy,  and  gracious  God  at  all,  we  are  compelled  to  be- 
lieve this  mystery  of  mysteries — sin — to  be  consistent  with 
his  spotless  character,  universal  supremacy,  absolute  and 
beneficent  rule.  As  Dr.  Salmond  observes:  "The  greatest 
thinkers  have  felt  that  if  the  problem  of  the  existence  of  sin 
and  sinners  could  be  made  clear  to  us,  we  should  the  more 
easily  understand  the  problem  of  their  continuance"  Mean- 
while, if  we  admit  the  root  of  evil  to  be  consistent  with  God's 
wisdom  and  love,  why  find  any  difficulty  in  admitting  the 
fruit  of  it  to  be  so  too  ?  The  objection  should  be  taken 
earlier,  otherwise  we  "strain  out  the  gnat  and  swallow  the 
camel." 

7.  Causes  Operating  Positively  toward  Alleged  Neclect. 

Looking  now  at  the  question  on  its  positive  side,  there  are 
doubtless  several  considerations  operating  powerfully  to 
bring  about  the  doubt  and  hesitation  which  tend  to  seal  the 
preacher's  lips  as  to  the  future  of  the  lost.  We  can  only 
advert  briefly  to  the  chief  of  these. 

I.  There  is — perhaps  it  is  only  a  passing  mood — the  ab- 
sence even  in  the  religious,  but  much  more  in  the  unrenewed, 
mind  of  any  vivid  sense  of  the  exceeding  sinfulness  and  ill- 
desert  of  sin.  Its  eternally  offensive  nature,  its  corrupting 
and  polluting  power,  its  far-extending  and  eternal  conse- 
quences are  not  clearly  apprehended  nor  deeply  felt  in  our 
day.  Even  in  its  worst  forms  it  is  condoned  as  misfortune, 
as  the  result  of  human  frailty  or  false  environment,  or  both; 
often  as  the  error  of  noble  but  misdirected  impulses, 
meriting  more  the  pity  both  of  God  and  man  than  the  severe 
blame  of  either.  It  is  a  missing  of  the  mark  (d/zaprta) 
through  the  ignorance,  infirmity,  want  of  moral  precision  of 


138  Ecce  Clerus 

the  marksman ;  or  it  is  a  false  step,  a  blunder  {TTopaTTTUfia), 
rather  than  a  deliberate  stepping  over  the  forbidden  line 
(napdfiaoig) — a  conscious  and  intentional  disregard  of  divine 
authority,  or  a  habitual  contempt  and  defiance  of  law  (avofiia), 
or  a  wrong  with  a  double  aspect  (ddiKia) — a  course  of  con- 
duct unjust  alike  to  God  and  to  men.  And  this  failure  to 
discern  the  real  inwardness  of  moral  evil — this  tendency  to 
emphasize  sin  in  its  character  of  error  and  weakness,  and 
to  minimize  or  ignore  its  preponderating  scriptural  aspect 
of  moral  offense,  perversity,  guilt,  and  condemnation — makes 
the  holy  and  unceasing  antagonism  of  God's  nature  to  it 
seem  "much  ado  about  nothing,"  and  the  preacher's  faith- 
ful denunciations  of  its  inevitable  doom  a  vain  beating  of 
the  air. 

2.  There  is,  too,  more  than  ever  a  tendency  of  reason  to 
usurp  the  place  of  faith.  Not  reason  disciplined  and  sobered 
by  the  difficulties  of  life,  of  science,  and  philosophy — rever- 
ently cognizant  of  mystery  alike  in  nature,  providence,  and 
religion,  and  instructed  by  divine  revelation.  To  this  God 
makes  his  appeal.  But  it  is  reason  arguing  over-confidently 
from  her  own  dubious  and  fallible  premises,  and  acting  as  the 
self-constituted  judge  of  those  universal,  eternal,  and  in- 
comprehensible principles  which  are  the  essence  of  God's 
moral  character  and  the  immovable  basis  of  his  moral  gov- 
ernment.* 

*  Dr.  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  quotes,  in  his  delightful  volume,  Over  the  Teacups 
(pp.  253,  254)1  'he  words  of  Mr.  John  Morley,  concerning  "  the  horrors  of  what  is  per- 
haps the  most  frightful  idea  that  has  corroded  human  character,  the  idea  of  eternal 
punishment,"  and  remarks,  "All  the  reasoning  in  the  world,  all  the  proof-texts  in  old 
manuscripts,  cannot  reconcile  this  supposition  of  a  world  of  sleepless  and  endless  tor- 
ment with  the  declaration  that  '  God  is  love ! '  Where  did  this  frightful  idea  come  from? 
We  are  surprised  as  we  grow  older  to  find  that  the  legendary  hell  of  the  Church  is 
nothing  more  nor  less  than  the  Tartarus  of  the  old  heathen  world.  It  has  the  mark  of 
coming  from  the  cruel  heart  of  a  barbarous  despot." 

To  this  it  may  be  answered  : 

I.  The  "reconciliation"  of  eternal  punishment  with  God's  essential  love  is  not  more 
"  hopeless  "  than  the  reconciliation  of  many  other  coexistent  and  indisputable  facts, 
such,  for  example,  as  the  tender  mercy  and  absolute  power  of  God_  with  the  indescrib- 
able "  horrors  of  the  middle  passage,  as  it  was  called,  or  the  miseries  of  the  modern 
slums,  where  the  present  well-being  of  thousands  of  helpless  children  is  sacrificed  to 
adult  intemperance,  improvidence,  and  debauchery.  But  God  is  no  more  responsible 
for  the  hells  of  the  future  than  for  those  of  the  present,  both  being  obviously  the  result 


Bugbear  of  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit     139 

3.  Then  the  natural  result  of  this  tendency  to  enthrone 
reason  in  its  narrower  sense  where  faith  should  reign  is  a 
state  of  general  theological  unsettledness  affecting  the  whole 
of  Protestant  Christendom.  Everywhere  traditional  beliefs 
are  being  overhauled  and  theological  conviction  is  in  a 
state  of  flux.  The  most  conservative  of  Churches  are  tear- 
ing their  old  confessions  and  standards  of  faith  to  pieces. 
Already  the  age  has  seen  some  of  the  most  familiar  and 
venerable  of  dogmas 

Fold  their  tents  like  the  Arabs, 
And  silently  steal  away. 

Many  have  felt  the  old  homestead  of  faith  coming  down 
over  their  heads  and  have  left  it  before  the  roof  fell  in,  and 
not  having  found  either  time  or  inclination  to  build  them- 
selves another  shelter,  are  out  in  the  cold.  And  like  -^neas, 
who  stands  afar  off  and  sees  Troy  sink  in  flames,*  they  are 
doomed  apparently  to  encounter  many  storms,  to  be  tossed 
on  waves  of  doubt,  and  to  wander  in  desolate  places  abound- 
ing only  in  anxieties  and  sorrows. 

In  periods  of  great  intellectual  activity  in  the  history  of 
the  Church  each  of  the  cardinal  doctrines  of  Christianity 
has  come  in  succession  into  the  hot  crucible  of  controversy, 

of  the  perverseness  of  the  human  will  in  resisting  the  necessary  and  benignant  laws  of 
the  divine  government. 

2.  There  is  absolutely  no  evidence  that  either  the  Hades  or  the  Gehenna  of  the 
New  Testament  was  adopted  from  heathen  mythology.  Even  were  it  so,  Christianity 
never  claimed  a  monopoly  of  fact  and  truth.  The  word  Tartarus  is  met  with  only 
once  in  the  New  Testament  writings,  namely,  in  the  Second  Epistle  of  Peter  (ii,  4), 
which  was  received  late  into  the  Christian  canon,  but  the  idea  of  hell  long  antedated 
Peter's  adoption  of  the  term  Tartarus. 

3.  So  far  from  having  "every  mark  of  coming  from  the  Cruel  heart  of  a  barbarous 
despot,"  the  author  and  chief  exponent  of  the  doctrine  is  Jesus  Christ,  in  whose 
authentic  teaching  it  is  firmly  imbedded.  Is  it  a  sign  of  cruelty  of  disposition  when  a 
mother  reminds  her  beloved  child  that  fire  bums  and  sharp  instruments  inflict  hurtful 
wounds  when  carelessly  handled,  and  when  she  warns  him  not  to  play  with  them  ? 
Does  the  teaching  of  Jesus  and  of  his  apostles  go  beyond  the  simple  unveiling 
(aTTO/caAtn^if,  Rom.  i,  18)  and  definite  statement  of  the  eternal  law  which  governs  the 
relation  of  the  sowing  of  to-day  to  the  reaping  of  the  hereafter — the  link  which  insep- 
arably connects  present  character  and  eternal  destiny  ?  Christianity  does  not  create  the 
facts  and  laws  it  unfolds.  Neither  is  he  a  despot  who,  himself  knowing,  mercifully 
makes  known  the  morally  inevitable  to  men  blinded  by  vice  and  passion,  and  not  only 
provides  a  reasonable  method  of  escape,  but  urges  them  to  use  it  by  accepting  the 
conditions. 

*  "  Turn  vero  omne  mihi  visum  considere  in  ignes 
Ilium  et  ex  irao  verti  Neptunia  Troja." 

—Vergil,  Lib.  ii,  634. 


140  Ecce  Clems 

but  somehow,  without  taking  the  precaution  to  mark  the 
heated  vessel  with  a.  crux,  in  the  manner  of  the  old  chemists, 
to  prevent  the  devil  from  marring  the  refining  process, 
Christian  thinkers  have  ever  got  the  precious  deposit  of  re- 
vealed truth  out  of  the  testing  jar  in  an  improved  rather  than 
in  a  deteriorated  condition.  At  one  time  the  subject  of  in- 
vestigation and  dispute  has  been  the  divinity  of  Christ, 
leading  slowly  but  surely  to  the  development  of  the  doctrine 
of  the  Trinity  and  the  formation  of  the  Nicene  Creed.  At 
another  it  has  been  the  nature  and  extent  of  the  atonement, 
resulting  in  the  construction  respectively  of  the  Calvinistic 
and  Arminian  systems  of  Soteriology.  At  another  it  is, 
as  at  present,  the  literary  composition,  age,  authorship,  value, 
and  validity  of  the  documents  of  the  Christian  faith,  mainly 
of  the  Old  Testament,  or,  again,  it  is  the  doctrine  of  the  life 
to  come.  To-day  it  may  be  said  that  there  is  scarcely  any 
Protestant  Church  or  denomination  within  the  limits  of 
Christendom  that  is  not  more  or  less  agitated  by  the  ques- 
tion as  to  the  final  state  of  unrenewed  souls  ;  and  of  course 
the  natural  consequence  of  this  uncertainty  is  silence  all 
round — profound,  oppressive,  ominous,  almost  unbroken 
silence. 

Is  this  silence  excusable?  It  may  be  true,  as  Dr.  Sal- 
mond.  Professor  of  Theology  in  the  Free  Church  College, 
Aberdeen,  contends  in  his  able  and  scholarly  discussion  of 
'*  The  Christian  Doctrine  of  Immortality,"  that  '*  a  true 
theology  will  confess  its  own  limitations,  and  will  not  pre- 
sume to  give  an  answer  to  every  difficulty ;  will  recognize 
that  the  Christian  revelation  is  given  not  to  utter  all  the 
secrets  of  another  world,  but  to  make  God  known  to  us  and 
to  bring  him  near;  will  seek  to  be  positive  up  to  Christ's 
word;  will  not  be  ambitious  to  be  wise  beyond  it;  will  be 
satisfied  to  be  silent  where  Christ's  voice  has  not  spoken, 
and  will  leave  much  that  is  dark  in  man's  life,  here  and  here- 
after, to  the  eternal  wisdom  that  keeps  so  much  in  reserve ; 


Bugbear  of  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit     141 

in  a  word,  it  will  be  content  to  see  that  all  is  in  the  hand  of 
a  God  of  grace,  and  its  assurance  will  be  that  the  farthest 
future  can  discover  nothing  that  will  not  be  consistent  with 
the  perfect  love  and  righteousness  which  are  revealed  in 
Christ."  But,  on  the  other  hand,  as  Dr.  Salmond  is  careful 
to  observe,  we  are  warranted  in  concluding  that  *'  Christ's 
own  teaching  gives  the  significance  of  finality  to  the  moral 
decisions  of  the  present  life.  If  there  are  possibilities  of 
change,  forgiveness,  relaxation  of  penalty,  or  cessation  of 
punishment  in  the  future  life,  his  words,  at  least,  do  not 
reveal  them.  He  never  softens  the  awful  responsibilities  of 
this  life  even  by  the  dim  adumbration  of  such  possibilities. 
His  recorded  sayings  nowhere  suggest  the  provision  of  min- 
istries of  grace,  whether  new  or  continued,  in  the  after- 
existence.  They  nowhere  speak  of  a  place  of  repentance 
unto  life  in  the  other  world.  They  nowhere  open  the  pros- 
pect of  remedial  discipline  in  the  disembodied  state,  or  of 
terminable  award  in  the  condition  which  follows  the  great 
day.  They  bring  the  two  events,  death  and  judgment,  into 
relation,  and  give  no  disclosure  of  an  intermediate  state 
with  untold  potentialities  of  divine  love  and  human  sur- 
render. They  never  traverse  the  principle  that  this  life  is 
the  scene  of  opportunity,  and  this  world  the  theater  of 
human  fates."* 


APPENDIX  TO  CHAPTER  VI. 

It  is  possibly  a  fact  of  some  consequence  in  this  con- 
troversy, as  Dr.  Beet,  the  author  of  Last  Things,  seems  to 
insist  that  Plato,  indorsing  the  opinion  of  his  master, 
Socrates,  teaches  in  the  Phxdo  (105^-107'^)  "the  natural 
immortality  and  indestructibility  of  the  soul  "  (■'/'^^^  aBava- 
rov  Kal  dvuXedpov) — Zast  Things,  p.  194.  But  it  is  surely  a 
fact  of  still  vaster  significance  that  this  doctrine  has  been 

*  "  The  Christian  Doctrine  of  Immortality,"  by  Stewart  D.  F.  Salmond,  M.A.,  D.D, 


142  Ecce  Clerus 

held  and  supported  by  the  almost  unbroken  consensus  of 
Christian  thinkers  for  nearly  nineteen  centuries;  and  as 
this  doctrine  professes  to  be  derived  by  them  not  from  the 
master  of  the  Academy,  but  from  a  careful  study  of  the  ex- 
plicit and  implicit  teachings  of  the  Christian  Scriptures,  it 
will  scarcely  be  contended  that  the  earlier  and  smaller  fact, 
standing  alone,  is  any  adequate  explanation  of  the  later  and 
larger  phenomenon,  as  Dr.  Beet  evidently  wishes  us  to  be- 
lieve. That  would  be  like  an  attempt  to  poise  the  pyramid 
of  argument  on  its  apex.  Dr.  Beet  admits  that  the  Phar- 
isees in  the  lifetime  of  Christ  and  the  New  Testament 
writers  held  this  opinion  of  the  soul's  natural  immortality  as 
distinctly  as  Plato  or  Cicero.  If  it  be  necessary  to  seek  the 
origin  of  this  view  anywhere  outside  the  New  Testament, 
why  derive  it  from  a  remote  source  in  Plato  and  ignore  its 
proximate  explanation  in  the  well-known  teachings  of  the 
Pharisees }  Is  not  this  a  case  of  carrying  coals  to  Newcastle  ? 
The  author  of  Last  Things  labors  through  three  hundred 
scholarly  pages  with  the  poor  result,  as  it  seems  to  us,  of 
reducing  the  New  Testament  teachings  to  vagueness,  para- 
dox, and  confusion.  In  his  Appendix  he  pierces  every  posi- 
tive conclusion  of  contemporary  writers  on  the  subject  . 
with  the  sharp  spear-thrust  of  his  logic,  but  tantalizes  the 
reader  by  never  arriving  at  any  definite  conclusion  of  his 
own.  As  an  example  of  his  hesitancy  and  confusion  of 
mind  in  this  sort  we  quote  the  following  contradictory  dicta 
from  his  pages :  "  The  ultimate  fate  of  the  lost  is  not  pre- 
cisely defined  in  the  Bible  "  (p.  282).  "  We  know  so  little 
about  the  ultimate  punishment  of  sin  and  the  dissolution  of 
the  universe  that  analogy  affords  no  sure  basis  for  argument 
or  even  conjecture"  (p.  272).  The  dogma  of  the  eternal 
conscious  suffering  of  the  lost  is  "  a  docrine  which  lies  open 
to  serious  moral  objection"  (p.  275),  and  "is  contradicted 
by  the  clear  and  abundant  teaching  of  the  New  Testament " 
(p.   293).      **  The   theories   of  annihilation    and   universal 


Bugbear  of  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit     143 

restoration  are  destitute  of  sufficient  evidence,  the  latter 
being  contradicted  by  the  plain  teaching  of  Christ  and  of 
Paul"  (p.  271). 

Now,  if  "  the  ultimate  fate  of  the  lost  is  not  precisely  de- 
fined in  the  Bible,"  it  would  be  interesting  to  know  just 
what  definite  doctrine  as  to  the  fate  of  lost  men  "the  clear 
and  abundant  teaching  of  the  New  Testament,"  which  so 
conclusively  disproves  Universalism,  on  the  one  hand,  and 
"  contradicts  "  the  doctrine  of  conscious,  endless  suffering 
of  the  lost,  on  the  other,  refers  to.  How  can  there  be  "  clear 
and  abundant  teaching"  on  a  subject  which  is  "not  pre- 
cisely defined  "  and  about  which  "we  know  so  little  ?  " 

In  his  careful  and  exhaustive  discussion  of  the  meaning 
of  the  adjective  aloivioq  Dr.  Beet  forgets  that  in  the  increas- 
ing light  of  the  New  Dispensation  Old  Testament  words 
(and  especially  the  more  vaguely  defined  and  more  elastic 
terms)  naturally  acquire  a  deeper  meaning,  as  they  have  to 
express  a  larger  and  fuller  revelation  of  God's  mind  and  of 
the  future.  The  meaning  of  a  word  in  the  Old  Testament 
must,  of  course,  be  a  more  or  less  safe  clew  to  its  true  import 
in  the  New,  but  the  limit  of  its  meaning  in  the  former  can- 
not be  the  measure  of  its  significance  in  the  latter.  Now,  if 
in  determining  the  precise  sense  of  any  word  in  the  New 
Testament  its  clear  and  indisputable  meaning  in  the  vast 
majority  of  instances  where  it  is  employed  be  allowed  to 
have  any  weight,  there  can  hardly  be  any  question  as  to  the 
primary  and  pivotal  sense  of  the  adjective  alojviog.  For  of 
the  seventy  places  in  which  it  is  used  forty-three  occur  in 
the  phrase  "  eternal  life,"  as  Dr.  Beet  himself  points  out,  and 
the  meaning  in  all  these  cases  is  admitted  by  all  to  be  beyond 
dispute.  In  twenty  of  the  remaining  cases  it  ascribes  to  the 
object  it  qualifies  a  proper  eternity.  In  hardly  any  of  the 
small  residue  of  instances  can  its  import  be  &aid  to  be 
doubtful.  With  such  a  preponderance  of  evidence  showing 
its  true  meaning  to  be  endlessness  one  cannot  but  regret  that 


144  Ecce  Clems 

polemical  necessity  obliges  a  scholar  and  theologian  like 
Dr.  Beet  to  limit  its  significance  to  age  lasting.  The  phrase 
■ngb  xpovu)v  al(ovio)v  (Tit.  i,  2)  he  makes  to  mean  "  before  long 
periods  of  time  past,"  transferring  the  limited  sense  of  the 
word  in  the  Old  Testament  to  the  pages  of  the  New. 
It  will  probably,  however,  be  admitted  that  such  "long 
periods  of  time  past  "  antedated  the  creation  of  man,  and 
as  the  Lamb  of  God  is  said  to  have  been  slain  from  the 
foundation  of  the  world,  so  in  view  of  and  in  conjunction 
with  that  sacrifice,  eternally  projected  and  purposed  in  the 
divine  mind,  God  promised  or  purposed  in  himself,  before 
times  eternal — npo  xpovuv  alcjviwv — to  bestow  eternal  life 
on  those  who  should  believe,  these  having  been  "chosen  in 
Christ  (Eph.  i,  4)  before  the  foundation  of  the  world " 
(npd  KaTaf^oXfjg  Koofiov),  "  that  they  should  be  holy  and 
without  blame  before  him  in  love."  All  the  fundamental 
verities  and  institutions  of  revealed  religion  emerging  in 
time  under  the  aegis  and  action  of  divine  Providence  are 
based  on  eternal  archetypal  ideas,  and  as  these  ideas  have 
their  root  and  reason  in  the  nature  of  God,  they  are  eternal 
in  the  same  sense  that  he  is  eternal.  Dr.  Beet's  exegetical 
device,  therefore,  though  ingenious,  only  excites  distrust, 
and  is  certainly  not  without  some  risk  of  bringing  the 
great  "science  of  theology  "  into  the  "  contempt  "  which  he 
so  earnestly  and  justly  deprecates. 

The  present  writer  disavows  any  personal  or  polemical 
interest  in  the  decision  of  this  question  of  the  final  fate  of 
the  lost  one  way  or  the  other.  For  many  years  he  was  un- 
decided, now  leaning  to  this  solution  and  then  to  that,  as 
the  weight  of  evidence  and  argument  swayed  him  in  the 
course  of  a  patient  and  protracted  study  of  the  whole  prob- 
lem. Latterly,  in  spite  of  the  enormous  difficulties  which 
he  still  feels  to  beset  the  question,  he  has  reached  the  con- 
clusion that  the  plain  and  obvious  drift  of  the  teaching  of 
Jesus  and  his  apostles  is  toward  the   doctrine   held  and 


Bugbear  of  Present-day  Evangelical  Pulpit     145 

taught  almost  unanimously  by  the  Christian  Church,  early, 
mediaeval,  and  modern,  east  and  west,  Protestant  and  Cath- 
olic, for  more  than  eighteen  hundred  years. 

Though  compelled,  however,  to  disagree  with  many  of  the 
positions  assumed  by  the  author  of  Last  Things^  the  present 
author  cannot  but  regret  that  Dr.  Beet,  having  had  the 
courage  to  publish  his  views,  has  not  had  the  firmness  to 
sustain  them  and  resist  the  pressure  put  upon  him  by  a  com- 
mittee of  the  Wesleyan  Conference  to  withdraw  his  book 
from  sale  and  circulation  in  England.  The  motto  of  the- 
ological as  of  all  other  truth  is,  "  He  who  wrestles  with  me 
strengthens  me." 
10 


146  Ecce  Clerus 


CHAPTER  VII 
Homiletical  Craftsmanship 

It  seems  to  me  that  I  built  into  my  house  every  one  of  those  superb 
autumn  days  which  I  spent  in  the  woods  getting  stone.  I  did  not  quarry 
the  limestone  ledge  into  blocks  any  more  than  I  quarried  the  delicious  weather 
into  memories  to  adorn  my  walls.  Every  load  that  I  sent  home  carried  my 
heart  and  happiness  with  it.  The  jewels  I  had  uncovered  in  the  debris  or 
torn  from  the  ledge  in  the  morning  I  saw  in  the  jambs  or  mounted  high  on 
the  corners  at  night.  Every  day  was  filled  with  great  events.  The  woods 
held  unknown  treasures.  .  .  .  When  you  bait  your  hook  with  your  heart  the 
fish  always  \yi.\.^.—John  Burroughs. 

Character  and  experience  form  the  quarry  from  which  the  only  material 
of  any  value  can  be  drawn  ;  they  supply  the  only  force  which  carries  it  home ; 
and  they  are  its  only  effectual  and  adequate  illustration.  ,  .  .  There  are  a 
great  many  excellent  sermons  that  are  spoilt  in  the  minds  of  the  hearers 
because  side  by  side  with  the  sermon  as  it  proceeds  so  beautituUy  there  is  the 
personality  of  the  preacher.— ^aw^ijj  Chapman, 

t.  Personality  of  the  Craftsman* 

In  preaching,  as  in  many  other  noble  callings,  much  less 
depends  on  method  than  upon  the  man.  In  every  position 
of  responsibility  personality  is  largely  the  secret  of  power, 
but  nowhere  quite  so  emphatically  as  in  the  ministerial 
profession.  In  science,  philosophy,  statesmanship,  law, 
literature,  art,  handicraft,  or  common  industry,  where,  if 
anywhere,  proficiency  and  eminence  would  seem  to  be  in- 
dependent of  character,  the  ivork  to  a  shrewd  and  practiced 
observer  bears  unmistakably  the  sign-manual  of  the  man. 
No  marvel,  surely,  that  in  view  of  this  fact  the  moral  tone 
and  status  of  the  occupant  of  the  modern  pulpit  should  be 
more  and  more  regarded  as  the  one  supreme  and  vital  con- 
sideration. The  preacher  of  to-day  is  required  not  alone  to 
proclaim  and  expound,  but  to  personally  embody  and  ex- 
emplify that  trinity  of  moral  and  spiritual  excellence  which 


Homiletical  Craftsmanship  147 

is  the  goal  of  all  salvation  worthy  of  the  name — "  the  true, 
the  good,  the  beautiful "  {to  d^TjOeg^  ro  dyadov^  to  KaXov). 
To  him  it  is  given  to  preach  **  the  unsearchable  wealth  of 
Christ ; "  to  be  "  a  steward  of  the  manifold  grace  of  God," 
And  of  this  exhaustless  and  varied  good  his  own  well- 
instructed  and  thoroughly  disciplined  soul  must  be  a  de- 
pository. The  prince  of  Roman  poets,  at  the  opening  of 
his  song,  announces  a  double  theme.  He  sings  of  "arms" 
and  of  the  "  man  "  who  bore  them.  But  quite  naturally  his 
strain  is  mainly  concerned  with  the  personality  and  prowess 
of  the  hero,  since  it  is  these  alone  which  make  the  arms 
worth  singing  about.  So  here,  in  speaking  of  homiletical 
method,  the  main  emphasis  must  be  placed  on  the  charac- 
ter and  capability  of  the  craftsman.  On  him  presses  with 
peculiar  gravity  in  these  days  the  obligation  which  finds  ex- 
pression in  the  familiar  lines: 

Thou  must  be  true  thyself, 

Tf  thou  the  truth  wouldst  teach. 
Thy  soul  must  overflow,  if  thou 

Another  soul  would  reach. 
It  needs  the  overflowing  heart 

To  give  the  lips  full  speech. 

Think  truly,  and  thy  thought 

Shall  the  world's  famine  feed. 
Speak  truly,  and  thy  word 

Shall  be  a  fruitful  seed. 
Live  truly,  and  thy  life  shall  be 

A  great  and  noble  creed. 

The  great  artist  who  constructed  the  immense  shield  of 
Minerva  for  the  Acropolis  of  Athens,  in  the  golden  age  of 
Greece,  felt  so  sure  he  had  "cast  bread  upon  the  waters 
which  would  be  seen  after  many  days  "  that  he  did  not  hesi- 
tate to  commit  his  fame  as  exemplified  in  the  product  of  his 
art  to  the  custody  of  posterity.  So  skillfully  did  he  manage  to 
insert  the  letters  of  his  name  amid  the  matchless  carvings 
of  that  monument  of  genius  that  it  was  impossible  to  erase 
them  without    injuring    the  shield  itself.     And  if  Phidias 


148  Ecce  Clems 

was  proud  enough  of  the  offspring  of  his  well-disciplined 
talent  to  be  willing  to  risk  his  reputation  on  its  artistic 
merits  for  untold  generations,  how  much  more  ought  the 
master  of  a  far  nobler  craft  to  feel  himself  called  upon  to 
cultivate  a  moral  and  intellectual  personality  which  he  will 
not  be  ashamed  to  find  stamped  ineffaceably  on  the  work  of 
his  life  ?  The  art  of  the  preacher  as  far  transcends  the  art 
of  the  painter,  the  sculptor,  or  the  architect  as  the  value 
and  durability  of  moral  impressions  are  greater  than  those 
of  sensuous  and  aesthetic  emotion,  and  the  living  character 
of  a  Washington,  a  Gladstone,  or  a  Lincoln  is  of  more 
worth  to  the  world  than  the  stereotyped  beauty  of  a  thou- 
sand Apollo  Belvederes.  What  Fra  Angelico  did  for  the 
cells  of  San  Marco,  and  Michael  Angelo  did  for  the  ceiling 
of  the  Sistine  Chapel,  a  true  proclaimer  of  "  the  Gospel  of 
the  grace  of  God"  like  Savonarola,  Luther,  Wesley,  or 
Spurgeon  does  for  the  souls  that  are  privileged  to  hear 
him.  He  paints  images  of  moral  loveliness — visions  of 
truth  and  personal  rectitude — on  walls  that  cannot  crumble 
or  decay.  "  Let  your  light  so  shine  among  men,"  said 
Christ  to  the  Galilean  fishermen,  who  were  in  subsequent 
years  to  catch  men  by  '*  baiting  the  hook  with  their  hearts," 
*'  that  they  may  see  your  good  works  {rd  KaXd  epya — noble 
and  honorable  deeds),  and  glorify  your  Father  which  is  in 
heaven "  (Matt,  v,  i6).  The  phrase  is  one  which  the 
Greeks  were  accustomed  to  employ  in  expressing  their  ad- 
miration of  the  highest  order  of  plastic,  pictorial,  or  ora- 
torical art,  as  well  as  of  the  loftiest  types  of  moral  conduct. 
Did  ever  master-artist  present  to  his  pupils  a  loftier  stand- 
ard of  excellence  or  address  to  them  a  nobler  incentive  to 
godlike  endeavor  than  this  ? 

2.  Power  of  the  Ideal  in  Sermon-making* 

It  is  the  more  necessary  to  insist  on  this  inward  prepared- 
ness in  the  man  who  aspires  to  be  a  workman  beyond  re- 


Homiletical  Craftsmanship  149 

proach  or  shame,  "  rightfully  dividing  the  worth  of  truth," 
inasmuch  as  such  highly  developed  spiritual  condition  alone 
renders  possible  the  ideal  which  makes  a  difficult  and  often 
discouraging  task  attractive  and  pleasant,  illumining  and 
transfiguring  human  nature  and  human  life,  and  enabling 
the  preacher  to  see  the  possibilities  of  sainthood  in  every 
Magdalene,  a  rock  of  fidelity  and  firmness  potentially  in 
every  impulsive  and  vacillating  Peter,  a  guileless  Israelite  in 
the  man  who  incredulously  asks,  "  Can  any  good  thing  come 
out  of  Nazareth  ?  "  an  apostle  of  love  in  the  youth  who  seeks 
authority  and  encouragement  to  invoke  the  consuming  fire 
of  heaven  upon  the  heads  of  his  opposers.  Of  the  awards 
bestowed  at  the  Greek  athletic  contests  Walter  Besant  says  : 
"  The  actual  prize  was  of  little  or  no  worth — a  cloak  in  the 
Athenian  games,  but  at  the  greater  games  a  mere  handful 
of  parsley,  a  few  sprigs  of  pine  or  wild  olive.  The  prize 
had  only  an  intellectual  or  moral  value,  yet  Pindar's  verse 
(in  which  the  prizemen's  achievements  are  celebrated  and 
idealized)  are  all  of  gold  and  wine  and  flowers."  What 
John  Burroughs  says  of  the  observer  of  nature  is  true,  in 
even  a  deeper  degree,  of  the  man  whose  business  it  is  to 
study  human  life  with  sympathy  and  insight,  and  interpret 
and  apply  the  revealed  mind  of  God  to  man's  various 
needs.  "  One  secret  of  success  in  observing  nature,"  says 
this  high  priest  in  the  Temple  of  the  Cosmos,  *'  is  capacity 
to  take  a  hint ;  a  hair  may  show  where  a  lion  is  hid.  One 
must  put  this  and  that  together  and  value  bits  and  shreds. 
Much  alloy  exists  with  the  truth.  The  gold  of  nature  does 
not  look  like  gold  at  the  first  glance.  It  must  be  smelted 
and  refined  in  the  mind  of  the  observer.  And  one  must 
crush  mountains  of  quartz  and  wash  hills  of  sand  to  get  it. 
To  know  the  indications  is  the  main  matter.  People  who 
do  not  know  the  secret  are  eager  to  take  a  walk  with  the 
observer  to  find  where  the  mine  is  that  contains  such 
nuggets,  little  knowing  that  his  ore-bed  is  but  a  gravel  heap 


150  Ecce  Clerus 

to  them.  How  insignificant  appear  most  of  the  facts  which 
one  sees  in  his  walks,  in  the  life  of  the  birds,  the  flowers,  the 
animals,  or  in  the  phases  of  landscape  or  the  look  of  the 
sky  ! — insignificant  until  they  are  put  through  some  mental 
or  emotional  process  and  their  true  value  appears.  The  dia- 
mond looks  like  a  pebble  until  it  is  cut.  One  goes  to  nature 
only  for  hints  and  half  truths.  Her  facts  are  crude  until  you 
have  absorbed  them  or  translated  them.  Then  the  ideal 
steals  in  and  lends  a  charm  in  spite  of  one.  It  is  not  so  much 
what  we  see  as  what  the  thing  seen  suggests"  * 

It  is  this  suggestiveness  of  nature,  of  history,  of  human 
life,  of  God's  revealed  word,  which  the  preacher  needs  to 
perceive  and  appreciate.  And  it  is  this  capacity  to  supply 
the  ideal  which  differentiates  the  true  interpreter  of  di- 
vine and  human  things  from  the  false ;  the  fruitful  from 
the  barren ;  the  man  of  power  in  the  pulpit  from  the  prosy 
mumbler  who  once  a  week  makes  the  "  house  of  God  "  a 
cemetery  or  sleeping  place  for  those  who  are  not  yet  quite 
dead.  It  is  this  which  gives  each  fragment  of  inspired 
truth  power  to  kindle  thought,  making  the  text  chosen  like 
a  diamond  of  many  facets,  flashing  light  from  many  sides. 
It  is  this  which  gives  the  preacher's  rhetoric  its  sparkle, 
vividness,  and  charm ;  his  argument  its  vigor,  scope,  com- 
pactness, and  power  to  convince;  his  illustrations  luminosity 
and  aptness  ;  his  appeal  its  impressiveness  and  force.  It 
gives  warmth  and  color,  life  and  movement,  to  his  thought, 
energy  to  his  style,  precision  and  fluency  to  his  expression, 
melody  and  richness  to  his  voice,  and  propriety  and  fitness 
to  his  manner  and  action.  It  is  the  direct  result  of  the  in- 
dwelling Holy  Spirit's  power  on  the  soul  of  the  preacher, 
and  its  presence  or  absence  makes  or  mars  the  sermon,  no 
matter  who  the  man  who  preaches  it,  or  what  the  thought- 
ful care  and  conscientious  toil  employed  in  its  construction. 

♦  Signs  and  Seasons,  p.  33. 


Homlletical  Craftsmanship  151 

3.  Unity  of  Theme  and  Thought. 

Then  this  ideal  as  inspired  and  sustained  by  the  Holy 
Spirit  offers  service  to  the  craftsman  of  the  pulpit  in  an- 
other way.  It  makes  the  text  selected  a  living  revelation 
to  the  preacher's  soul,  and  his  sermon  an  authoritative 
message  to  his  hearers.  It  enables  him  to  contemplate  his 
subject  clearly  and  steadily,  and  to  grasp  it  whole  ;  to  see 
the  desired  destination  from  the  start.  "An  artist,"  says 
Frith,  the  English  Royal  Academician,  "  must  see  his  picture 
finished  in  his  mind's  eye,  or  he  will  never  be  an  artist  at 
all."  And  a  preacher  who  is  not  mind-full,  heart-full,  and 
conscience-full  of  his  theme  will  never  preach  impressively 
and  with  profit  to  his  hearers.  When  one  grand  thought 
inspires  the  mind,  and  an  absolute  singleness  of  purpose 
illumines  its  sight,  directs  its  effort,  and  absorbs  its  energy, 
discursiveness  and  vagueness  of  treatment  become  next  to 
impossible.  The  ruling  idea  keeps  the  mind  on  its  guard 
against  the  most  tempting  allurements  to  turn  aside,  and 
sustains  its  resolution  to  pursue  the  straightest  and  shortest 
course,  with  a  view  to  the  earliest  possible  arrival  at  the 
desired  goal.  It  secures  concentration  of  all  the  powers  of 
the  soul  on  the  one  work  of  the  moment.  The  entire 
man  preaches,  and  when  the  complete  manhood  of  the 
pulpit  preaches  the  undivided  manhood  of  the  pews  listens 
and  is  blest. 

'*  It  is  impossible  to  do  a  thing  badly  that  fills  the  whole 
soul,"  especially  if  it  has  been  filling  the  whole  soul  for 
some  time  and  gradually  developing  into  ideal  form,  as 
"a  thing  of  beauty"  and  icTrifia  elg  del — a  thing  forever 
precious.  The  sermon-making  faculty  ought  at  least  to  be 
as  studiously  and  severely  cultivated  as  the  noblest  of 
the  fine  arts.  Every  homily  ought  to  be  as  truly  an  ex- 
pression of  the  preacher's  consecrated  life  and  powers  as 
the  picture  or  the  oratorio  is  an  expression  of  the  painter's 
or  the  musician's  undivided  soul.     Until  this  is  done  evan- 


"V,- 


152  Ecce  Clems 

gelical  preaching,  which  is  showing  indubitable  signs  of 
decay,  will  never  become  that  joy  to  the  preacher  and  that 
blessing  to  all  the  people  which  it  was  manifestly  meant 
to  be. 

Modestly  disclaiming  any  special  aptitude  as  a  pulpit  ora- 
tor, a  man  whose  labors  as  a  lay  preacher  have  been  signally 
owned  of  God  says :  "  The  success  which,  in  the  mercy  of 
God,  has  attended  my  own  weak  efforts  in  the  pulpit  and 
some  of  the  remarkable  incidents  of  visible  conversion 
to  God  I  have  been  permitted  to  witness,  is  a  great  secret 
to  me,  and  one  I  cannot  explain."  He  actually,  however, 
though  unwittingly,  lets  drop  the  very  secret  which, 
humanly  speaking,  "explains"  everything,  when  he  says: 
"A  man  to  be  successful  in  his  work  must  be  at  it,  hard 
at  it,  and  always  at  it — his  home  life,  his  business  life,  his 
social  life,  his  church  life,  all  made  subservient  to  this  one 
great  work  of  preaching  the  Gospel."  "This  one  thing  I 
do  "  is,  to  use  the  phrase  of  Carlyle,  "  significant  of  much  " 
in  every  department  of  intellectual  activity,  and  nowhere 
of  more  than  in  this  noblest  department  of  all. 

Mrs.  Macfadyen,  "the  sermon-taster"  of  Drumtochty  in 
Beside  the  Bonnie  Brier  Bush,  listening  critically  to  the 
Highland  preacher,  McTavish,  thought  herself  master  of 
the  situation  when  "the  great  trumpet  which  shall  be 
blown"  (Isa.  xxvii,  13)  was  duly  announced  a^  "a  leeteral 
trumpet,  a  heestorical  trumpet,  a  metaphorical  trumpet,  and 
a  speeritual  trumpet."  But  when  the  preacher,  in  defiance 
of  all  the  homiletical  unities,  blew  first  one  trumpet,  then 
another,  crossing  and  recrossing  his  own  division  lines  with- 
out a  moment's  warning,  she  grew  perplexed.  And  yet  the 
worst  was  to  come ;  for  when  at  nine  o'clock  at  night,  after 
preaching  three  full  hours,  he  said,  "  We  will  now  consider 
Satan  in  all  his  characteristics,"  she  grew  pale  with  vexa- 
tion, lost  all  patience,  began  to  shuffle  her  feet,  and  thus 
hopelessly  stained  her  faultless  record  for  reverent  behavior 


Homiletical  Craftsmanship  153 

in  church.  In  its  very  extravagance  the  situation  is  typical. 
The  present  writer  listened  to  a  sermon  preached  in  a  col- 
lege town  to  a  score  of  college  professors,  a  hundred  and 
fifty  students,  and  about  a  hundred  other  educated  and 
thoughtful  auditors.  The  text  announced  was  the  beautiful 
and  inspiring  promise,  "And  I,  if  I  be  lifted  up  from  the 
earth,"  etc.  But  the  central  thought  of  the  text,  the  moral 
grandeur  and  attractiveness  of  the  divine  self-sacrifice  and 
victim — the  thought  which  fascinated  even  the  skeptical 
soul  of  Shelley  when,  in  Prometheus  Unbound^  he  sang : 

I  alit 
Upon  a  great  ship  lightning  split, 
And  speeded  thither  on  the  sigh 
Of  one  who  gave  his  enemy 
His  plank,  then  plunged  aside  to  die, 

was  never  even  remotely  approached  during  the  whole 
service  until  the  sweet- voiced  choir  led  in  the  hymn,  "  In 
the  cross  of  Christ  I  glory."  As  the  author  stood  singing 
with  tears  filling  heart  and  eyes  and  voice  he  thanked  God 
for  the  gracious  compensation  offered  in  that  noble  strain 
against  a  dismal  disappointment,  and  said  to  himself, 
"  What  a  mercy  it  is  we  sing  hymns  in  church  ! "  Brim- 
ful as  the  best  of  them  are  of  the  finest  evangelical  senti- 
ment, they  are  often  a  disappointed  and  hungry  people's 
one  unfailing  crumb  of  comfort  after  the  poverty  and  failure 
of  the  sermon. 

4.  Selection  of  Materials. 

Now,  aimless  and  purposeless  vagrancy  of  this  kind  is  as 
gratuitous  and  unnecessary  in  the  pulpit  as  it  is  harmful 
and  blameworthy.  For  when  once  the  mind  of  the  sermon- 
builder  fully  surrenders  itself  to  the  all-inspiring  and  domi- 
nant idea  of  the  text,  materials  for  the  sermon-structure 
rapidly  accumulate  and  are  easily  selected,  or  rather  assimi- 
lated— the  true  sermon  being  much  less  an  intellectual  crea- 
tion than   the   evolution   of  a   moral   and  spiritual  force, 


154  Ecce  Clems 

expressing  itself  in  terms  of  the  intellect.  If  the  central 
thought  has,  as  it  always  ought  to  have,  a  sublimity,  gran- 
deur, fullness,  and  suggestiveness  of  its  own,  it  will  have  no 
need  to  be  flattened  out  thin,  like  gold  leaf,  in  order  to  cover 
the  ground  required;  no  need  to  descend  from  its  high 
plane  or  deflect  from  its  straightforward  course  in  search  of 
means  of  development,  expansion,  and  illustration.  Sover- 
eign ideas,  like  royal  personages,  do  not  impoverish  them- 
selves by  traveling.  As  in  the  progress  of  a  reigning  prince 
through  a  loyal  country  there  is  not  only  a  large  retinue  of 
willing  servitors,  courtiers,  and  attendants,  but  homage,  aid, 
hospitality,  contributions  for  ornament  and  decoration, 
vectigal  of  various  kinds  and  the  freedom  of  cities  are  freely 
brought  and  offered  at  the  halting  stages,  without  the  neces- 
sity of  turning  aside  a  moment  from  the  predetermined 
line  of  march  ;  so  the  broad  fields  of  nature,  the  realms  of 
science,  the  world  of  art,  the  page  of  history,  the  groves 
and  porticoes  of  philosophy,  the  treasures  of  literature,  and 
the  gleanings  of  travel  offer  themselves  freely  for  the  eluci- 
dation of  the  essential  and  eternal  verities  of  revelation. 
Should  the  germ-thought  decided  upon  prove  poor  in  kin- 
dred and  powerless  to  attract  a  sufficient  amount  of  homo- 
geneous and  illustrative  matter,  to  set  it  off"  to  advantage 
and  make  it  forcible  and  impressive  to  an  audience,  that  is 
the  best  reason  for  a  timely  abandonment  of  the  desolate 
and  unpromising  topic  and  the  selection  of  another  of 
nobler  pedigree,  of  more  suggestive  character,  and  of  greater 
wealth  of  kin.  It  is  fabled  that  when  Minerva  found,  by 
looking  into  a  fountain  near  Mount  Ida,  that  playing  upon 
her  favorite  flute  distorted  her  looks  and  made  her  a  laugh- 
ing-stock to  her  sister  goddesses — Venus  and  Juno — she 
threw  the  beloved  instrument  into  the  water,  pronouncing 
a  melancholy  death  on  anyone  who  ventured  to  take  it  out 
again.  The  preacher  should  avoid  every  bare  and  barren 
theme,  no  matter  what  its  attraction,  whose  treatment  is 


Homiletical  Craftsmanship  155 

likely  to  cost  him  more  labor,  anxiety,  and  painstaking  than 
he  can  give  of  edification  and  help  to  his  hearers. 

And  the  appositeness  and  relevancy  of  the  subsidiary 
matter  should  always  be  obvious  and  easy  to  perceive.  It 
is  hardly  to  be  expected  that  the  more  subtle  and  less  ap- 
parent relations  of  thought  to  thought  will  be  as  quickly 
discerned  and  as  fully  appreciated  in  the  pews  as  they  are 
in  the  study  and  the  pulpit.  A  preacher  may  easily  com- 
mit the  fatal  mistake  of  underestimating  the  intelligence, 
culture,  and  capacity  of  his  audience,  but  there  is  at  least 
an  equal  danger  of  overrating  not  their  ability  but  their 
willingness  to  think.  On  the  whole,  it  is  safer  to  be  ultra- 
plain  and  simple  than  excessively  profound.  "  Recollect 
that  you  are  addressing  people  who  need  to  be  taught  like 
children,"  is  the  warning  to  the  young  men  of  his  college 
of  that  very  distinguished  and  successful  preacher,  Mr. 
Spurgeon ;  "  for  though  they  are  grown  up,  the  major  part 
of  our  hearers,  as  to  the  things  of  God,  are  still  in  a  state  of 
childhood,  and  if  they  are  to  receive  the  truth,  it  must  be 
made  very  plain  and  packed  up  so  as  to  be  carried  away 
and  laid  up  in  the  memory."  * 

Metaphysical  speculations,  loose,  disjointed  thinking,  far- 
fetched and  irrelevant  allusions,  promiscuous  snatches  of 
poetry  and  prose,  with  the  violent  transitions  they  often  in- 
volve, are  unedifying,  offensive  even  to  uncultured  minds; 
while  nothing  is  more  satisfactory  than  lucid  and  logical  state- 
ment, well-compacted  argument,  and  a  clear-cut  issue.  No  au- 
dience cares  to  be  jogged  too  much  at  homiletical  switches. 

The  principle  of  selection,  too,  ought  to  be  determined 
not  so  much  by  the  intrinsic  value  and  interest  of  the 
material  itself  which  happens  to  be  on  hand,  as  by  the  im- 
mediate object  of  preaching  and  the  needs  of  the  souls 
whose  present  and  eternal  welfare  is  earnestly  desired  and 
sought.      Every  man   truly   designated  of  heaven   to   the 

*  Inaugural  address  to  the  students  of  the  Pastor's  College. 


156  Ecce  Clems 

evangelical  ambassadorship  will  have  no  difficulty  in  nod- 
ding a  cordial  assent  to  the  words  of  the  great  Baptist 
preacher.  "  God,"  says  he,  "  deserves  the  best  oratory,  the 
best  logic,  the  best  metaphysics,  the  best  of  everything,  but 
if  ever  rhetoric  stands  in  the  way  of  the  instruction  of  the 
people,  a  curse  on  rhetoric  ;  if  any  educational  attainment 
or  natural  gift  which  we  possess  should  make  it  less  easy 
for  the  people  to  understand  us,  let  it  perish.  May  God 
rend  away  from  our  thought  and  style  everything  which 
darkens  the  light,  even  though  it  should  be  like  a  costly  veil 
of  rarest  lace."  Elsewhere  descanting  on  the  tendency  to 
sacrifice  the  great  end  of  preaching  to  literary  form,  ele- 
gance of  style,  accuracy  of  dogmatic  statement,  etc., 
he  says :  "  A  man  must  have  a  stout  digestion  to  feed  on 
some  men's  theology — no  sap,  no  sweetness,  no  life,  but  all 
stern  accuracy  and  fleshless  definition,  proclaimed  without 
tenderness  and  argued  without  affection  ;  the  Gospel  from 
such  men  rather  resembles  a  missile  from  a  catapult  than 
bread  from  a  Father's  table.  Teeth  are  needlessly  broken 
over  the  grit  of  systematic  theology,  while  souls  are  famish- 
ing. To  turn  stones  into  bread  was  a  temptation  of  our 
Master,  but  how  many  of  his  servants  yield  readily  to  the 
worse  temptation  to  turn  bread  into  stones!  Go  thy  way, 
metaphysical  divine,  to  the  stoneyard,  and  break  granite  for 
Macadam,  but  stand  not  in  the  way  of  loving  spirits  who 
would  feed  the  family  of  God  with  living  bread.  The  in- 
spired word  is  to  us  spirit  and  life,  and  we  cannot  afford  to 
have  it  hardened  into  a  huge  monolith  or  a  spiritual  Stone- 
henge,  sublime,  but  cold  ;  majestic,  but  lifeless." 

5.  Simplicity  of  Structure* 

Not  less  important  to  the  craftsman  than  the  spiritual 
nutritiveness  and  digestibility  of  the  material  is  the  sim- 
plicity of  the  structure  of  the  sermon.  A  preacher's  lofti- 
ness of  aim  and  earnestness  of  purpose  reveal  themselves  in 


Homiletical  Craftsmanship  157 

this  as  much  as  in  anything.  What  the  naturalist  of  the 
Hudson  says  of  architecture  contains  a  principle  which  is 
largely  applicable  to  sermon-building.  "  The  great  monu- 
mental structures  of  the  Old  World  show  no  pride  or 
vanity,  but,  on  the  contrary,  great  humility  and  singleness  of 
purpose.  The  Gothic  cathedral  does  not  try  to  look  beauti- 
ful ;  it  is  beautiful  from  the  start,  and  entirely  serious. 
London  Bridge  is  a  heroic  resolution  in  stone,  and  ap- 
parently has  but  one  purpose,  and  that  is  to  carry  the  paved 
street  with  all  its  surging  masses  safely  over  the  river." 
The  very  lines  of  strength  and  evidences  of  weight  and 
stability  which  the  practiced  eye  craves  in  architecture  the 
ear  also  desires  in  a  sermon.  "  It  prefers  the  broad,  con- 
spicuous lines  of  structure  to  the  small,  fine  lines  of  finish 
and  ornament."  The  hearer  likes  to  have  the  motive  of  the 
discourse  and  the  principle  of  its  construction  open  and 
apparent.  He  likes  to  see  how  the  whole  thing  stands  up 
and  is  held  together ;  that  it  is  not  a  structure  of  paste- 
board and  paint  and  gilding ;  that  every  paragraph,  every 
sentence,  every  word,  is  a  necessary  part  of  the  whole,  a 
stone  alive  with  purpose,  which  cannot  be  displaced  from 
its  position  in  the  wall  without  weakening  the  building  and 
marring  the  effect  It  is  a  relief  and  a  pleasure  to  him  to 
see  that  the  structure  does  not  need  to  be  anchored  against 
the  wind  or  buttressed  against  the  settling  of  the  foundation. 
The  words  of  Burroughs  are  as  true  of  the  pulpit  as  of  the 
street,  as  applicable  to  a  certain  kind  of  sermon  as  to  a  cer- 
tain style  of  domestic  architecture.  "  Go  to  the  city,"  he 
says,  "  walk  up  and  down  the  principal  thoroughfares  and 
see  what  an  effort  many  of  the  buildings  make  to  stand  up. 
What  columns  and  arches  they  put  forth,  where  no  columns 
or  arches  are  needed  !  There  is  endless  variety  of  form 
and  outline,  great  activity  of  iron  and  stone,  when  the  eye 
demands  simplicity  and  repose."* 

*  Signs  and  Seasons,  p.  288. 


158  Ecce  Clems 

6*  Homeliness  of  Illustration. 

Nor  ought  this  principle  of  simplicity  to  be  confined  to 
the  organic  structure  of  the  sermon.  It  is  equally  ap- 
plicable to  its  illustrative  matter.  In  nothing  is  Christ,  as 
supreme  Teacher  of  his  Church,  more  obviously  a  model 
for  the  preacher  of  all  time  than  in  the  aptness,  homeliness, 
and  transparency  of  his  analogues  and  illustrations.  In 
many  things  he  is  inimitable  and  must  ever  stand  alone — 
the  peerless  prophet  of  the  New  Dispensation  to  whom  "  all 
bare  witness  and  wondered  at  the  gracious  words  that  pro- 
ceeded out  of  his  mouth,"  as  "he  taught  them  as  one 
having  authority,  and  not  as  the  scribes."  Here,  however, 
his  footprint  is  plain;  his  example  invites  and  encourages 
emulation.  To  him  nature,  in  all  her  variety  of  mood  and 
aspect,  and  human  life,  in  all  its  wide  range  of  type,  occu- 
pation, and  experience,  half  suggested  and  half  concealed 
great  spiritual  verities.     The  suggestion  of  Milton : 

What  if  earth  be  but  the  shadow  of  heaven  ; 
And  things  therein  each  to  each  other  like 
More  than  on  earth  is  thought  ! 

He  decisively  confirmed  as  in  simile  and  parable  he  un- 
veiled and  illumined  the  mysteries  of  the  "  kingdom  of 
God."  The  raven  of  the  sky;  the  lily  of  the  plain  ;  the 
housewife  leavening  her  meal,  or  mending  old  clothes  with 
patches  of  new  cloth,  or  anxiously  sweeping  the  floor  of  the 
dark  room  for  a  missing  coin  ;  the  sower  scattering  grain  on 
the  terrraced  slopes  of  the  Judean  and  Galilean  hills ;  the 
shepherd  seeking  his  lost  sheep  in  the  wilds,  adjacent  to  the 
fold,  and  returning  exultant  with  success ;  the  children  play- 
ing in  the  market,  now  at  funeral  and  now  at  wedding,  now 
shedding  the  tear  of  mimic  sympathy,  now  piping  to  induce 
a  dance,  in  the  vain  attempt  to  oblige  and  please  their  dis- 
affected playmates ;  the  lone  traveler  pausing  by  the  wayside 
to  compassionate  and  help  the  half-murdered  victim  of 
human  cupidity  and  violence ;  the  inexperienced  and  way- 


Homiletical  Craftsmanship  159 

ward  youth  who  leaves  his  home  for  freedom  and  adventure, 
and  whose  sanity  and  sense  of  manhood  return  to  him  amid 
scenes  of  infamy,  degradation,  and  shame — such  are  ex- 
amples of  the  homely  parabolic  method  by  which  present 
and  visible  things  were  made  to  speak  to  the  innermost  soul 
of  man  of  another  and  a  nobler  world  beside  and  beyond 
the  present  material  and  visible  one.     Says  Keble  : 

Two  worlds  are  ours  ;  'tis  only  sin 

Forbids  us  to  descry 
The  mystic  heaven  and  earth  within 

Plain  as  the  sea  and  sky. 

To  reveal  this  "mystic  heaven  and  earth  within,"  and 
make  it  plain  and  familiar  as  the  sea  and  sky  to  the  popular 
thought  and  conviction,  is  the  supreme  aim  and  sublimest 
achievement  of  the  Christian  preacher. 

To  do  this  eifectually  only  requires  an  open  and  ap- 
preciative eye  and  ear  and  a  soul  intensely  in  sympathy 
with  divine  and  human  things.  The  sermon-maker's  best 
"  Encyclopedia  of  Illustrations  "  is  the  world  around  him  and 
the  life  of  man  as  lived  in  history  and  in  the  passing  hour. 
Here  he  may  pick  the  flower  as  he  wants  it  fresh  from  the 
stem.  Here,  almost  any  day,  he  may  set  his  trap  to  catch 
the  sunbeam,  though,  when  he  has  caught  the  luminous 
hint,  he  should  leave  it  hovering  angel-like  in  its  ethereality 
and  freedom  on  the  outskirts  of  the  imagination.  He 
should  not  try  to  pinion  or  imprison  it  in  literary  form, 
emulating  the  mythical  truant  schoolboy  in  his  attempt  to 
tie  the  rainbow  to  a  tree.  Elaboration  in  such  cases  is  the 
martyrdom  of  beauty.  "  The  freshness  of  first  thought  is 
lost  in  the  finish  of  reflection."     If 

To  be  possessed  with  double  pomp, 
To  guard  a  title  that  was  rich  before, 
To  gild  refined  gold,  to  paint  the  lily, 
To  throw  a  perfume  on  the  violet, 
To  smooth  the  ice,  or  add  another  hue 
Unto  the  rainbow,  or  with  taper-light 
To  seek  the  beauteous  eye  of  heaven  to  garnish 


160  Ecce  Clerus 

were  "  wasteful  and  ridiculous  excess,"  it  is  surely  no  less 

foolish   to   hide   nature's   spontaneous   hints  and  obvious 

analogues   in  a  haze   of    brilliant   rhetoric.     What   would 

have  become  of  "the   sower  who  went  forth  to  sow,"  or 

"  the   good    Samaritan,"  or    "  the  prodigal   son,"  or  "  the 

wise  and  foolish  virgins  "  in  such  a  process  of  refinement 

and  elaboration  ?     As  Tennyson  wisely  observes  : 

Truth  in  closest  words  shall  fail, 

When  truth  embodied  in  a  tale 

Shall  enter  in  at  lowly  doors. 

And  so  the  word  had  breath,  and  wrought 

With  human  hands  the  creed  of  creeds. 

In  loveliness  of  perfect  deeds 
More  strong  than  all  poetic  thought, 

Which  he  may  read  that  binds  the  sheaf. 
Or  builds  the  house,  or  digs  the  grave, 
And  those  wild  eyes  that  watch  the  wave 

In  roaring  round  the  coral  reef. 

And  yet  a  distinguished  living  preacher  and  churchman 
of  the  time,  regardless  of  the  example  of  Christ,  and  oblivi- 
ous of  the  requirements  of  the  common  mind  and  the  con- 
ditions of  successful  Gospel  preaching,  commends,  in  Jeremy 
Taylor's  famous  sermons  of  the  Golden  Grove,  a  homiletical 
vogue,  which,  were  it  as  prevalent  to-day  as  it  once  was, 
would  do  more  than  almost  anything  else  to  enslave  the 
homilist,  discredit  preaching,  and  weaken  the  hold  of  the 
pulpit  on  the  popular  conscience  and  affection.  "We,"  he 
says,  "  who  are  but  the  pickers-up  of  learning's  crumbs  ;  we 
who  in  the  Church  of  the  present  day  can  hardly  count  five 
profoundly  learned  men,  stand  incapably  amazed  before  the 
sermons  of  the  seventeenth  century  in  their  inexhaustible, 
their  prodigious  fertility.  .  .  .  An  ordinary  sermon  of  the 
present  day,  compared  in  point  of  splendor,  variety,  and 
erudition  with  a  sermon  of  Jeremy  Taylor's,  is  like  a  squalid 
brick  Bethesda  in  some  poverty-stricken  Dissenting  village 
in  comparison  with  the  high  embowered  roofs  and  storied 
windows  of  a  Gothic  cathedral.  What  a  range  of  reading 
— Hebraic,  Hellenic,  theological,  literary — we  encounter  in 


Homiletical  Craftsmanship  161 

these  discourses  of  Golden  Grove!  The  historians,  the 
philosophers,  the  orators  of  Greece;  the  poets,  the  satirists, 
the  epigrammatists  of  Rome  ;  the  Greek  fathers,  the  Latin 
fathers,  the  schoolmen,  the  casuists,  the  scholars,  the 
Italian  poets,  the  classicists  of  the  Renaissance;  French 
romances,  Arabic  legends  ;  this  fivpiovog  dvrig  seems  to  be 
familiar  with  them  all.  And  what  wealth  of  illustration  ! 
Persian  kings,  glittering  among  the  satraps  of  Asia,  Roman 
banquets,  Chian  wines  in  purest  crystal,  Lamiae  that  turn 
to  serpents,  Lybian  lions,  Pannonian  bears,  stags  whose 
knees  are  frozen  in  icy  streams ;  statues  decapitated  to 
make  room  for  other  heads  ;  '  poor  Atilius  Aviola  (as  though 
everyone  knew  all  about  him) ; '  the  *  condited  bellies  of  the 
Scarus,"  drinking  of  healths  by  the  numeral  letters  of  Phile- 
nium's  name  ;  the  golden  and  alabaster  houses  of  Egyptian 
Thebes ;  the  quaint,  the  pedantic,  the  imaginative,  the 
marvelous,  the  grotesque — these  alternate  with  exquisitely 
natural  images  derived  from  the  green  fields  and  the  violet 
and  the  thrush's  song."*  But  if  the  prime  object  of  preach- 
ing is  not  pedantic  ostentation,  not  the  manipulation  of  a 
literary  kaleidoscope  for  the  entertainment  and  amusement 
of  the  people,  but  to  impress,  convince,  persuade,  admonish, 
edify,  and  comfort  human  souls,  this  homiletical  panorama* 
this  "  prodigious  fertility  "  of  learned  allusion  is  a  mistake. 
It  is  arming  the  "  ambassador  for  Christ  "  with  a  bludgeon  in 
place  of  "  the  sword  of  the  Spirit."  It  is  equipping  the  heels 
of  the  evangelical  Mercurius  with  wings  of  lead  rather  than 
with  feathers  of  flame.  It  is  to  divert  men's  minds  from  "  the 
simplicity  which  is  in  Christ,"  and  blind  them  to  the  vital  and 
immediate  issue — their  personal  relation  and  duty  to  God  un- 
der the  Gospel.  And,  as  Archbishop  Leighton  observes : 
"He  who  would  teach  men  the  precepts  of  spiritual  wisdom 
before  their  minds  are  drawn  off  from  foreign  objects,  and 

•Archdeacon  Farrar's  "  Jeremy  Taylor,"  in  Masters  in  English  Theology,  edited 
by  Barry. 

11 


162  Ecce  Clerus 

turned  inward  upon  themselves,might  as  well  write  his  instruc- 
tions, as  the  sybil  wrote  her  prophecies,  on  the  loose  leaves  of 
trees,  and  commit  them  to  the  mercy  of  the  inconstant  winds." 

7*  Adaptedness  to  the  Spiritual  Needs  of  the  People. 

The  one  consideration,  which  however,  perhaps  more  than 
any  other,  tends  to  simplify  the  labors  of  the  sermon-builder, 
and  needs  to  be  constantly  kept  in  sight,  is  the  spiritual 
condition  and  requirements  of  the  people.  He  who  has 
adapted  the  rays  of  light  to  the  tender  structure  and  ex- 
treme sensitiveness  of  the  eye,  and  the  vibrations  of  sound 
to  the  delicate  organism  of  the  ear,  and  "tempered  the 
wind  to  the  shorn  lamb,"  has  with  still  greater  skill  and 
care  adjusted  the  provisions  of  redemption  to  the  needs  of 
man's  nature.  The  Gospel  of  the  grace  of  God  existed  in 
archetype  and  idea  before  the  soul,  and  is  greater  than  the 
soul.  It  is  the  expression  of  an  infinite  and  unfathomable 
love — a  depth  in  which  the  plummet  of  human  and  angelic 
thought  is  lost.*  But  whether  regarded  as  a  gracious  pur- 
pose, quiescent  during  countless  ages,  in  the  eternal  mind, 
or  fighting  its  way,  as  a  saving  power,  through  the  darkness, 
error,  and  hindrance  of  history,  toward  embodiment  and 
realization  in  individual  life  and  destiny  ;  whether  adminis- 
tered by  men  or  by  angels  ;  by  patriarch,  priest,  prophet, 
apostle,  or  evangelist;  by  the  Incarnate  Christ,  or  by  the 
Comforter,  in  the  Old  Dispensation  or  in  the  New,  it  has 
steadily  kept  in  view  the  needs,  dangers,  difficulties,  of 
the  soul,  and  has  modified  its  message  and  its  ministry  to 
meet  them.f  And  the  study  of  men  in  their  variety  of 
condition,  temperament,  character,  culture,  social  and 
domestic  environment,  is  as  vital  to  success  as  the  study  of 
current  thought  and  opinion,  of  the  inspired  word  of  God, 
or  of  the  art  itself  of  presenting  the  truth  as  it  is  in  Jesus. 

There  ever  has  been  and  perhaps  ever  will  be  a  wide 

•  Rom.  xi,  33 ;  i  Pet.  i,  12,  t  Matt,  xix,  8 ;  Acts  xvii,  30. 


Homiletical  Craftsmanship  163 

difference  in  the  moral  capacity  and  aptitude  of  men  to 
receive  the  divine  message.  Even  in  the  ministry  of  the 
Son  of  God  the  light  and  shadow  of  acceptance  and  rejec- 
tion curiously  alternate.  "  The  common  people  heard  him 
gladly."  *  On  the  other  hand,  "It  cannot  be  that  a  prophet 
perish  out  of  Jerusalem."! 

"Among  the  chief  rulers  also  many  believed  on  him," 
remarks  the  apostle  John. J  "  Because  I  tell  you  the  truth 
ye  believe  me  not,"  is  his  own  solemn  charge  on  another 
occasion. §  "  Now  we  believe  not  because  of  thy  saying,  for 
we  have  heard  him  ourselves,  and  know  that  this  is  indeed 
the  Christ,  the  Saviour  of  the  world,"  ||  say  the  Samaritans. 
"  He  looked  round  upon  them  with  anger,  being  grieved  for 
the  hardness  of  their  hearts,"^  notes  the  evangelist  Mark. 
Of  the  great  prophet  who  came  to  announce  his  coming  and 
to  prepare  his  way  Jesus  said,  "  John  came  unto  you  in  the 
way  of  righteousness,  a.x\dye  believed  him  not,  but  the  publi- 
cans and  harlots  believed  him."**  Of  Jesus  John  said,  "  There 
standeth  one  among  you  whom  ye  know  not."ff 

The  same  inexplicable  moral  phenomena  meet  us  in  the 
record  of  apostolic  labor  ;  now  a  strain  of  triumph,  and  now 
a  note  of  defeat  and  deprecation.  "And  many  of  them  that 
heard  the  word  believed."  J  J  "  Ye  do  always  resist  the  Holy 
Ghost;  as  your  fathers  did,  so  do  ye."§§  The  Bereans 
"were  more  noble  than  those  in  Thessalonica."|||  And  as, 
in  reporting  the  last  appearance  of  the  risen  Lord  to  his 
disciples  in  Galilee,  Matthew  observes  :  "  And  when  they 
saw  him,  they  worshiped  him :  but  some  doubted"^%  so,  in 
closing  his  record  of  the  apostolic  cycle,  Luke  significantly 
says  of  the  Jews  in  Rome  who  visited  Paul  in  his  own 
hired  house,  "  And  some  believed  the  things  which  were 
spoken,  and  some  believed  not."*** 

*  Mark  xii,  37.             +  Luke  xiii,  13.  %  John  xii,  42.  §  John  viii.  45. 

II  John  iv,  42.  ^  Mark  iii,  5.  **  Matt,  xxi,  32,  tt  John  i,  26. 

it  Acts  iv,  4.  §§  Acts  vii,  51.  SI  Acts  xvii,  11.  ^1  Matt,  xxviii,  17. 
*♦*  Acts  xxviii,  24. 


164  Ecce  Clems 

These  are  types  which  still  survive.  These  are  items  of 
apostolic  experience  which  are  encountered  by  the  earnest 
and  faithful  pastor  and  preacher  of  to-day.  The  craftsman 
of  the  modern  pulpit  cannot  afford  to  ignore  this  diversity 
or  to  be  indifferent  to  the  vital  problem  it  suggests.  He 
will  never  be  able  satisfactorily  to  solve  it ;  he  cannot 
afford  to  leave  it  unconsidered.  That  he  "  may  not  run  in 
vain,  neither  labor  in  vain,"  he  needs  to  make  a  careful 
personal  diagnosis  of  the  moral  and  spiritual  condition  of 
his  people  as  far  as  time  and  opportunity  permit.  He  needs 
to  "know  their  state,"  not  only  that  he  may  be  "all  things 
to  all  men,  that  he  may  by  all  means  save  some,"  but  that  he 
may  be  to  the  fullest  possible  extent  a  comforter,  counselor, 
sympathizer,  edifier,  admonisher,  friend,  and  guide  to  the 
souls  over  whom  he  is  appointed  to  **  watch  as  one  that  must 
give  account." 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       165 


CHAPTER  VIII 
The  Chi-istian  Ministry  and  the  Masses 

I  dare  say  some  of  you  in  this  hall  are  accustomed  to  speak  of  this  great 
metropolis  with  pride,  of  its  size,  of  its  wealth,  of  the  teeming  millions  that 
inhabit  it.  I  give  you  my  assurance  that  no  thought  of  pride  has  any  connec- 
tion in  my  mind  with  the  idea  of  London.  I  am  always  haunted  by  the  aw- 
fulness  of  London  ;  by  the  great  appalling  effect  of  these  millions,  cast  down, 
as  it  would  appear,  by  hazard  on  the  banks  of  this  noble  stream,  working  each 
in  their  own  groove  and  their  own  cell  without  regard  or  knowledge  of  each 
other,  without  heeding  each  other,  without  having  the  slightest  idea  how  the 
other  lives,  the  heedless  casualty  of  unnumbered  thousands  of  men, — Lord 
Rosebery. 

Living  in  the  midst  of  the  Church  of  God  is  like  sailing  down  the  Nile  in  a 
boat.  One  is  charmed  with  the  luxuriance  of  either  bank  and  with  much  that 
is  beautiful  around ;  but,  alas  I  at  a  little  distance  on  either  side  lies  a  vast 
uncultivated,  we  had  almost  said  hopeless,  desert.  Some  are  at  rest,  because 
they  never  look  beyond  the  borders  of  the  Church,  but  those  whose  sympa- 
thies reach  to  all  humanity  will  have  to  carry  a  lifelong  burden. — C.  H. 
Spurgeon. 

\,  Condition  of  the  Masses. 

In  the  large  modern  city,  with  its  poverty,  immorality, 
overcrowding,  and  imperfect  sanitation,  the  statesman  and 
the  philanthropist  find  themselves  confronted  with  the 
thorniest  of  present-day  problems.  In  many  respects  the 
city  of  to-day,  seen  from  the  outside,  seems  all-sufficient  for 
itself.  Its  great  and  ever-growing  wealth  ;  its  keen,  argus- 
eyed  intelligence ;  its  world-wide  commercial  relations  ;  its 
industrial  activities  and  professional  skill ;  its  political, 
social,  educational,  and  religious  institutions;  its  art,  its 
science,  its  literature,  its  public  pageants  and  amusements, 
make  life  amid  its  surging  crowds  seem  very  desirable  to 
the  uninitiated  rustic.  But  an  interior  and  deeper  view  is 
not  so  prepossessing.     With  a  glimpse  of  its  vice,  crime,  pau- 


166  Ecce  Clerus 

perism,  poverty,  suffering,  and  sorrow,  there  comes  a  strong 
revulsion  of  feeling.  The  broad  suburban  avenue,  with  its 
big  shade  trees,  close-shaven  lawns,  and  stately  homes,  and 
the  crowded  and  gay  thoroughfares  of  traffic,  suggest  the 
swiftest  thought  of  wealth's  comfort  and  contentment ;  the 
lepers'  quarter,  with  its  congested  tenement  dwellings,  low 
saloons,  brothels,  thieves,  and  gamblers*  dens,  narrow  and 
dirty  streets  full  of  garbage  and  refuse,  and  alive  with  half- 
clad  children  breathing  the  odors  of  an  atmosphere  not  at 
all  suggestive  of  attar  of  roses,  disillusionizes  one  and  spoils 
the  glory  of  one's  dream.  One  discovers  at  a  glance  that 
what  may  be  the  paradise  of  the  rich  is  likely,  also,  to  be  the 
purgatory  or  even  pandemonium  of  the  poor,  and  that  the 
big  city  is  a  community  with  its  head  high  up  in  the  clouds 
and  its  feet  deep-sunk  in  the  intolerable  mud. 

With  the  phenomenally  rapid  growth  of  many  civic  com- 
munities there  are  being  gathered  to  points  of  concentra- 
tion all  the  worst  as  well  as  the  best  elements  and  energies 
of  human  nature.  One  of  the  most  striking  paragraphs  in 
a  remarkable  book,  published  some  years  ago — Jenkin's 
DeviFs  Chain — is  that  in  which  the  author  describes  the 
steady  stream  of  human  beings,  pouring  itself  night  and 
day  from  all  parts  of  the  earth — from  the  cities,  towns,  and 
villages  of  the  United  Kingdom,  from  the  countries  of  the 
Continent  of  Europe,  and  from  quarters  more  remote — into 
that  great  receptacle  of  the  financially,  socially,  morally,  and 
spiritually  bankrupt,  the  city  of  London.  Some  seek  the 
great  centers  of  industrial  and  business  activity,  impelled  by 
mistaken  hopes  and  ambitions  ;  others  are  drawn  there  by 
flattering  professional  openings,  or  by  the  prospect  of  em- 
ployment, or  the  bait  of  some  bogus  advertisement.  Many 
betake  themselves  there  as  political  refugees  from  other 
lands,  or  to  forget  and  hide  some  stain  of  reputation,  or  in 
the  hope  of  finding  an  asylum  from  the  hot  pursuit  of  jus- 
tice.    The  vicious  and  criminal  are  at  home  at  once  in  the 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       167 

jostling  crowd.  The  virtuous  and  honest,  coming  from 
quieter  scenes,  are  liable  to  find  the  pulse  of  life  in  the  city 
too  quick  and  hurried  and  its  competition  too  keen  for 
them.  They  are  unable  readily  to  adjust  themselves  to 
the  new  conditions,  and  get  stranded.  Failing  to  secure  or 
retain  employment,  they  become  homesick,  discouraged, 
and  slowly  sink  down  to  the  social  stratum  below  them. 
And  finding  after  repeated  efforts  of  self-extrication  that 
escape  is  impossible,  the  last  gleam  of  light  in  the  soul — 
the  "  hope  "  which  is  said  to  **  spring  eternal  in  the  human 
breast,"  but  does  not — expires.  This  is  the  natural  history 
of  more  than  half  the  vice,  crime,  poverty,  and  misery  of 
London,  Paris,  New  York,  Chicago,  and  other  overgrown 
communities  in  Europe  and  America.  The  steady  deple- 
tion of  rural  populations,  together  with  the  unbroken  influx 
of  foreign  immigrants,  to  feed  the  insatiable  maw  of  the  larger 
cities,  has  become  a  constantly  increasing  peril,  demanding 
the  immediate  and  practical  attention  of  the  thoughtful 
statesman,  the  social  reformer,  and,  above  all,  the  leaders  of 
the  Christian  Church. 

Miss  Jane  Addam,  of  the  Hull  House  University  Settle- 
ment, Chicago,  thus  describes  the  cosmopolitical  character 
of  the  densely  populated  region  of  the  city  where  she  and 
her  colaborers  are  at  work  :  "  Between  Halstead  Street 
and  the  river  live  about  ten  thousand  Italians,  Neapolitans, 
Sicilians,  and  Calabrians,  with  an  occasional  Lombard  or 
Venetian,  To  the  south,  on  Twelfth  Street,  are  many  Ger- 
mans, and  side  streets  are  given  over  almost  entirely  to 
Polish  and  Russian  Jews.  Still  farther  south  these  Jewish 
colonies  merge  into  a  huge  Bohemian  colony  so  vast  that 
Chicago  ranks  as  the  third  Bohemian  city  in  the  world.  To 
the  northwest  are  many  Canadian  French,  clannish  in  spite 
of  their  long  residence  in  America,  and  to  the  north  are 
many  Irish  and  first-generation  Americans."  * 

*  Philanthropy  and  Social  Progress,  p.  28. 


168  Ecce  Clerus 

A  precisely  similar  condition  of  things  exists  in  London,* 
in  New  York  city,  and  in  smaller  degree  in  many  other 
large  communities  in  Europe  and  the  United  States. 

As  to  the  moral,  social,  industrial,  and  sanitary  condition 
of  the  people  thus  crowded  together,  some  idea  may  be 
obtained  from  the  fourth  annual  report  of  the  United 
States  Commissioner  of  Labor.  The  report  is  professedly 
"  based  on  statistics  gathered  from  twenty-five  cities.  North, 
South,  East,  and  West,  and  may  be  taken  as  truly  represent- 
ative of  the  country  at  large."  As  it  does  not  profess  to 
deal  with  the  status  of  the  very  lowest  class  of  workers,  the 
tale  it  tells,  sad  as  it  is,  is  still  not  an  adequate  account  of 
the  trials,  privations,  and  miseries  endured  by  thousands  of 
the  toiling  masses.  Describing  the  conditions  under  which 
many  of  the  people  earn  their  bread  in  New  York  city, 
the  commissioner  says  :  "  As  respects  ventilation,  a  prop- 
erly regulated  workshop  is  the  exception.  The  average 
room  is  either  stuffy  and  close,  or  hot  and  close,  and  even 
where  the  windows  abound  they  are  seldom  opened.  Toilet 
facilities  are  generally  scant  and  inadequate,  a  hundred 
workers  being  dependent  sometimes  on  a  single  closet  or 
sink,  and  that  too  often  out  of  order."  In  Philadelphia 
"the  worsted  yarn  mills  employ  very  young  girls,  some- 
times violating  the  law  against  child  labor."  "  The  older 
mills"  [of  Providence,  R.  I.]  "are  defective  in  light,  venti- 
lation, and  space,  are  often  without  dressing  rooms,  and 
frequently  the  ordinary  sanitary  arrangements  are  disre- 
garded." Speaking  of  the  toilers'  homes,  the  report  says 
that  in  Brooklyn  '*  whole  streets  and  districts  of  tenement 
houses  are  given  over  to  poverty,  filth,  and  vice,  the  sani- 
tary and  moral  unwholesomeness  of  which  is  manifest."  In 
Cincinnati  "the  streets"  where  the   laboring   classes  live 

*  In  London  there  are  Irish,  250,000 ;  Scotch,  120,000 ;  Asiatics,  Africans,  Americans, 
45,000;  Germans,  60,000 ;  French,  30,000;  Poles,  7,000:  Jews,  40,000.  _  In  New  York 
citjr  it  is  computed  that  from  seventy  to  eighty  per  cent  are  foreign-born  or  the 
children  of  foreign-born  people. 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       169 

"  are  dirty  and  closely  built  up  with  ill-constructed  houses, 
holding  from  two  to  six  families.  Many  poorer  parts  of 
Cincinnati  are  as  wretched  as  the  worst  European  cities, 
and  the  population  looks  as  degraded."  As  to  New  York 
city,  the  crowded  condition  of  the  poor  and  struggling  is 
beyond  belief  unless  actually  witnessed.  This  brings  with 
it  disease,  death,  immorality,  etc.  Tall  rear  tenements 
block  up  the  small  air-spaces  that  are  insufficient  even  for 
the  front,  and  often  a  third  house  stands  behind  the  second. 
Sewerage  is  lacking  or  defective,  and  stenches  of  all  kinds 
prevail  in  the  poorer  quarters."* 

Dismal  as  this  picture  is  of  the  kind  of  life  lived  by 
thousands  of  the  wage-earners  of  American  cities,  it  may  be 
duplicated  almost  anywhere,  with  even  deeper  shadows,  in 
a  district  containing  a  population  of  from  eight  to  nine  hun- 
dred thousand  in  the  east  of  London.  "  Narrow  alleys — 
so  narrow  that  two  can  hardly  pass  each  other,  and  the  ad- 
jacent houses  seem  almost  to  meet  overhead — hotbeds  of 
smallpox  and  fevers,  so  impure  and  pestilential  that  any 
stranger  visiting  these  haunts  could  scarcely  breathe  the 
fetid  air,  and  would  sometimes  have  been  literally  driven 
backward  on  opening  suddenly  some  attic  door  or  diving 
into  the  darkness  of  some  cellar,  those  cellars,  damp, 
dark,  and  cold,  reeking  with  rotten  vegetable  matter  and 
the  accumulated  filth  of  years,  so  that  it  seemed  almost  im- 
possible for  the  starved  cats  of  the  neighborhood  to  shelter 
there.  But,  incredible  as  it  may  seem,  human  beings  crowded 
nightly  to  these  wretched  cellars,  which,  in  some  instances, 
were  rented  out  at  a  dollar  a  week  and  used  as  homes  by 
large  families.  Tenements  with  rotten,  creaking  stairs,  and 
roofs  through  which  the  rain  and  snow  could  find  an  easy 
access  to  the  garrets,  were  common.  All  the  rooms  were 
much  of  the  same  character  as  the  cellars  and  garrets,  so  far 
as  cleanliness  is  concerned — filth,  stench,  discomfort,  every- 

*  Congressional  Report,  1893. 


170  Ecce  Clerus 

where."  *  As  an  indication  of  the  hopeless  poverty  and  im- 
providence of  large  numbers  of  the  people,  it  is  significant 
that  of  the  three  hundred  thousand  huddled  together  in  the 
large  London  parish  of  St.  George 's-in-the-East  forty-seven 
per  cent  are  buried  by  the  parish.  "  Dante  was  said  to 
have  copied  the  horrors  of  his  Inferno  from  the  Hades  of 
Greek  and  Roman  mythology,  but  Dante  said  he  found  all 
his  hells  in  Florence.  We  need  not  go  to  any  far  antiquity 
to  find  with  exactness  every  human  torture  reflected  in  its 
fables.  In  London  you  shall  find  many  an  Ixion  bound 
fast  upon  his  never-pausing  wheel.  The  bent  back  of  Toil 
goes  round  with  the  revolving  year,  knowing  only  the  hard 
routine  of  a  life  without  knowledge,  bitter  days  going  down 
to  nights  of  stupor,  all  in  the  unsunned  Hades  of  Drudgery. 
Sisyphus  still  rolls  away  the  ever-returning  stone,  his  weary 
labor  passing  on  from  father  to  son,  from  mother  to  daugh- 
ter, with  no  hope  of  ending.  The  rock-bound  Titan  is  visi- 
ble in  every  victim  of  lust  or  drink,  preying  vulturelike  on 
his  vitals.  The  pauper  Tantalus  moves  hungry  amid  the 
tables  of  luxury."f 

'Tis  a  somber  and  melancholy  story.  And  yet,  though 
the  poverty,  degradation,  and  misery  of  the  people  in  the  con- 
gested quarters  of  the  city  are  sufficiently  appalling,  this  is  not 
the  only  dark  and  ominous  feature  with  which  present-day 
civilization  confronts  the  Christian  Church  and  her  leaders. 
Social  submergence  in  the  city  often  finds  its  counterpart 
in  the  privations  and  pauperism,  the  sins  and  sorrows,  of 
village  life.  "  It  is  when  I  go  down  from  our  house  to  the 
village,"  says  Mrs.  Humphrey  Ward's  Marcella  Boyce — the 
fair  young  socialist  of  Mellor  Park — "  when  I  see  the  places 
the  people  live  in,  when  one  is  comfortable  in  the  carriage 
and  one  passes  some  woman  in  the  rain,  ragged  and  dirty 
and  tired,  trudging  back  from  her  work,  when  one  realizes 

*  Mrs.  Ballington  Booth's  Beneath  Two  Flags,  pp.  91,  92. 
t  Moncure  Conway's  lecture  on  **  London," 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       171 

that  they  have  no  rights  when  they  become  old,  nothing  to 
look  to  but  charity,  for  which  we — who  have  everything — 
expect  them  to  be  grateful,  and  when  I  know  that  every  one 
of  them  has  done  more  useful  work  in  a  year  of  their  life 
than  I  shall  ever  do  in  the  whole  of  mine,  then  I  feel  that 
the  whole  state  of  things  is  somehow  wrong  and  topsy-turvy 
and  wicked''*  "Amazing!"  is  the  pitying  exclamation; 
"  starvation  wages,  hardships  of  sickness  and  pain,  horrors 
of  birth  and  horrors  of  death,  the  meanest  surroundings,  the 
most  sordid  cares  of  this  mingled  cup  of  village  fate  every 
person  in  the  room  had  drunk,  and  drunk  deep.  .  .  .  De- 
pendent from  birth  to  death  on  squire,  parson,  parish, 
crushed  often  and  ill  treated  according  to  their  own  ideas, 
but  bearing  so  little  ill  will,  amusing  themselves  with  their 
own  tragedies  even,  if  they  could  but  sit  by  a  fire  and  drink 
a  neighbor's  cup  of  tea."f 

2.  The  Problem  Stated. 

How  comes  it  to  pass  that  under  a  system  of  religion  and 
morals  professedly  containing  "  the  power  of  God  unto  sal- 
vation," I  and  after  nearly  two  millennia  of  effort  and  experi- 
ment in  preaching,  teaching,  creed-making,  and  theological 
controversy,  spurts  of  reforming  zeal,  styles  of  ritual,  modes 
and  forms  of  worship,  and  methods  of  ecclesiastical  admin- 
istration, we  are  still  confronted,  in  Christian  lands,  and  at 
the  close  of  the  most  enlightened  and  progressive  century 
the  world  has  known,  with  a  state  of  festering,  positive 
heathenism,  in  many  respects  worse  than  the  most  dismal 
negative  heathenism  anywhere  yet  discovered  ?  § 

Let  us  look  at  the  problem  as  it  stands.  We  find  our- 
selves as  churches  in  the  midst  of  the  masses  of  the  people 
who  are,  now  as  of  old,  as  sheep  scattered  abroad  by  the 

•  Mrs.  Humphrey  Ward's  Marcella,  p.  104.        +  Ibid.,  p.  84.  X  Rom.  i,  16. 

S  The  heathenism  that  is  such  in  spite  of  the  light  of  divine  revelation  and  the  active 
ministries  of  the  Christian  Church  may  properly  be  zsXX^d,  positive  as  compared  with 
that  which  is  such  simply  for  want  of  the  Gospel  message. 


172  Ecce  Clerus 

wolves  that  prey  upon  them  without  a  shepherd.  In  every 
aspect  of  their  being,  in  all  their  most  vital  interests,  they 
are  pursued,  bitten,  torn;  or  are  waylaid,  ensnared,  deceived, 
destroyed,  by  the  predatory  classes  that  hold  them  in  thrall, 
pander  to  their  worst  propensities,  and  fatten  upon  their 
ruin.  "  Talk  about  Dante's  hell,"  says  William  Booth,  "  and 
all  the  horrors  and  cruelties  of  the  torture  chamber  of  the 
lost !  The  man  who  walks  with  open  eyes  and  with  bleeding 
heart  through  the  shambles  of  our  civilization  needs  no  such 
fantastic  images  of  the  poet  to  teach  him  horror.  Often 
and  often  when  I  have  seen  the  young  and  the  poor  and  the 
helpless  go  down  before  my  eyes  into  the  morass,  trampled 
under  foot  by  beasts  of  prey  in  human  shape  that  haunt 
these  regions,  it  seemed  as  if  God  were  no  longer  in  his 
world,  but  that  in  his  stead  reigned  a  fiend,  merciless  as 
hell,  ruthless  as  the  grave."  * 

In  their  labor  the  people  are  the  victims  of  the  keen  and 
relentless  competition  of  capitalists  and  sweaters,  who.  Shy- 
locklike,  insist  on  having  their  "  pound  of  flesh,"  "  accord- 
ing to  the  bond,"  even  when  it  cannot  be  had  without  '*  the 
blood,"  to  which  they  have  not  the  audacity  to  pretend  any 
claim.  In  their  miserable  dwellings  in  which  they  find  shelter, 
but  no  kind  of  a  home,  they  are  at  the  mercy,  on  the  one  hand, 
of  the  uncurbed  and  insatiable  cupidity  of  real  estate  pro- 
prietors and  their  frequently  unprincipled  agents,  and,  on 
the  other,  of  the  remissness,  neglect,  corruption,  of  venal 
municipal  authorities,  who  expose  them  to  the  perils  of  in- 
sanitation  at  their  own  doors,  by  which  their  health  is  per- 
manently injured,  and  they  become  hopelessly  handicapped 
in  the  severe  and  ceaseless  struggle  for  a  livelihood.!     In 

*  In  Darkest  England,  p.  13. 

t  In  a  letter  to  Fleischer,  editor  of  the  Deutsche  Revue,  who  requested  his  opinion  on 
the  action  of  the  Emperor  of  Germany  in  summoning  a  conference  of  nations  in  1890  on 
the  labor  question,  the  late  Cardinal  Manning  said  :  "  The  condition  of  wage-earning 
people  of  every  European  country  is  a  grave  danger  to  every  European  state.  The 
hours  of  labor,  the  employment  of  women  and  children,  the  scantiness  of  wages,  the 
uncertainties  of  employment,  the  fierce  comoetition  _  fostered  by  modern  political 
economy,  and  the  destruction  of  domestic  life  resulting  from  all  these  and  other 
kindred  causes  have  rendered  it  impossible  for  men  to  live  a  human  life. 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       173 

some  countries,  like  Germany  and  Russia,  for  example,  the 
belated  barbarism  of  despotic  governments  cripples  and 
discourages  the  people's  industry,  demanding  the  best  years 
of  the  able-bodied  male  population  for  military  service  in 
order  to  maintain  enormous  standing  armies  and  throw  the 
shadow  of  a  perpetual  menace  over  the  peace  of  Europe; 
the  result  being  that  thousands  of  young  men  seeking 
refuge  from  the  military  conscription  of  their  own  lands 
enter  the  unequal  contest  for  places  and  prizes  in  the  broad 
but  overcrowded  arena  of  American  industry.  As  to  their 
morals  and  domestic  happiness,  thousands  of  wage-earners 
are  the  helpless  prey  of  the  saloon,  the  brothel,  the  gam- 
bler's dive,  the  money  lender,  the  easy-terms-of-payment 
furniture  dealer,  the  low  music  hall,  the  dime  museum,  and 
some  of  the  foulest  literature  issued  from  the  modern  press  ; 
while  as  to  their  religious  nature,  with  its  instincts,  hopes, 
and  aspirations,  it  is  crushed  to  death  between  the  hard 
millstones  of  their  own  stolid  indifference,  on  the  one  hand, 
and  the  criminal  indolence  of  the  Christian  Church,  on  the 
other. 

Now,  if  it  is  clear  that  the  salvation  of  the  people — tem- 
poral and  eternal — depends,  humanly  speaking,  on  two  great 
factors,  namely,  their  own  exertions  and  the  active  ministries 
of  Christianity,  it  is  equally  obvious  that  the  former  of  these 
can  only  be  expected  as  a  response — slow,  partial,  reluctant, 
often  discouragingly  cold — to  the  warm  and  persistent  ap- 
peals of  the  latter,  and  that  the  fatal  apathy  of  the  people 
will  never  be  broken  up  except  by  a  thoroughly  wide-awake 
and  continuously  aggressive  Church.  Can  it  be  said  that 
the  Church  and  the  ministry  of  to-day  are  giving  adequate 
and  substantial  attention  to  the  all-important  and  urgent 
problem?     "The  exceeding  bitter  cry  of  the  disinherited," 

"  How  can  a  man  who  works  fifteen  or  sixteen  hours  a  day  live  the  life  of  a  father  to 
his  children?  How  can  a  woman  who  is  absent  from  home  all  day  long  do  the  duties 
of  a  mother?  Domestic  life  is  impossible  ;  but  on  the  domestic  life  of  the  people  the 
whole  political  order  of  human  society  reposes.  If  the  foundation  be  ruined,  what  will 
become  of  the  superstructure  ?  " 


174  Ecce  Clerus 

says  the  most  sympathetic  and  practical  student  of  the  peo- 
ple and  their  miseries  the  present  century  has  produced, 
"has  become  to  be  as  familiar  in  the  ears  of  men  as  the  dull 
roar  of  the  streets  or  as  the  moaning  of  the  wind  through 
the  trees.  And  so  it  rises  unceasing,  year  in  and  year 
out,  and  we  are  too  busy  or  too  idle,  too  indifferent  or  too 
selfish,  to  spare  it  a  thought.  Only  now  and  then,  on  rare 
occasions,  when  some  clear  voice  is  heard  giving  more 
articulate  utterance  to  the  miseries  of  the  miserable  men,  do 
we  pause  in  the  regular  routine  of  our  daily  duties,  and 
shudder  as  we  realize,  for  one  brief  moment,  what  life  means 
to  the  inmates  of  the  slums.  But  one  of  the  grimmest  social 
problems  of  our  time  should  be  sternly  faced,  not  with  a 
view  to  the  generation  of  profitless  emotion,  but  with  a  view 
to  its  solution.  .  .  .  Why  all  this  apparatus  of  temples  and 
meeting  houses  to  save  men  from  perdition  in  a  world  which  is 
to  come,  while  never  a  helping  hand  is  stretched  out  to  save 
them  from  the  inferno  of  their  present  life  .''  Is  it  not  time 
that,  forgetting  for  a  moment  their  wranglings  about  the 
infinitely  little  or  infinitely  obscure,  they  should  concentrate 
all  their  energies  on  a  united  effort  to  break  this  terrible 
perpetuity  of  perdition  and  to  rescue  some,  at  least,  of 
those  for  whom  they  profess  to  believe  their  Founder  came 
to  die?"* 

3.  Failure  of  the  Church  to  Solve  the  Problem, 

Such,  at  any  rate,  would  seem  to  be  the  obvious  dictate 
of  Christian  duty.  But  what  is  being  done  ?  It  is  true  that 
many  churches  of  straitened  resources,  as  to  workers  and 
money,  are  doing  their  utmost  to  stem  the  swelling  tide  of 
popular  ignorance,  apathy,  improvidence,  irreligion,  im- 
morality, and  pauperism  around  them ;  but  it  is  also  true  that 
the  majority  of  large  and  wealthy  churches  in  the  cities  are 
heedless  of  and  indifferent  to  the  rampant  heathenism  often 

*  In  Darkest  England,  p.  15. 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       175 

lying  closely  contiguous  to  the  regions  where  they  dwell  and 
worship.  By  their  united  exertions  they  might  contribute 
effectively  toward  the  moral  and  social  transformation  of  the 
godless  masses  near  them  if  only  they  could  be  convinced 
that  they  have  any  reserve  of  time,  money,  and  spiritual 
energy  to  cope  with  a  task  and  a  duty  which,  while  they 
offer  nothing  to  denominational  vanity,  pride,  or  ambition, 
present  the  boldest  challenge  to  Christian  self-denial, 
patience,  faith,  and  courage.  But  the  plea,  even  where 
wealth  abounds,  is  that  they  are  too  poor  and  feeble  to  un- 
dertake new  responsibilities,  and  the  little  that  is  done  by 
the  rest  makes  no  deeper  mark  on  the  growing  areas  of 
poverty,  vice,  and  misery  than  would  be  produced  by  a 
baby's  fingers  scratching  a  granite  bowlder.*  Putting  aside, 
for  the  moment,  the  notorious  fact  that,  in  consequence  of 
the  hopelessly  divided  condition  of  Protestant  Christendom, 
"energies  and  resources,"  even  where  churches  are  com- 
paratively poor,  "are  poured  out  freely,"  not  that  souls  may 
be  won  for  Christ,  but  that  proselytes  may  be  gained  for 
sects  and  sets ;  that  there  are  hundreds  of  village  communi- 
ties where  four  or  five  men  are  stationed  to  do  the  work  that 
one  of  them  could  do,  and  probably  do  better  than  the  five; 
that,  in  consequence,  considerable  sums  of  money  are  raised 
to  gratify  denominational  prejudice  or  vanity  which  might 
be  expended  with  the  happiest  result  in  evangelizing  the 
neglected  quarters  of  the  cities  setting  all  this  aside,  let  us 
take  the  wealthiest  church  in  English-speaking  Christendom 
and  study  its  behavior  face  to  face  with  the  heathenism  of 
the  city  of  London.    From  an  article  on  "The  Wasted  Wealth 

♦A  comparison  of  the  census  of  church  attendance,  taken  Sunday,  October  i8,  1891, 
in  the  large  city  of  Liverpool,  with  one  taken  in  1881,  showed  a  falling  off  of  2,000  in 
spite  of  the  fact  that  during  the  ten  years  52  new  places  of  worship  had  been  erected 
with  accommodation  for  18,513  additional  worshipers;  that  additional  pastors  had 
been  appointed  and  additional  auxiliaries  and  organizations  had  come  into  existence. 
From  these  findings  the  editor  of  the  Daily  Post  drew  the  following  inferences: 
"  I.  There  is  an  evident  decay  of  interest  against  which  the  most  earnest  clergymen 
struggle  in  vain.  2.  In  many  districts  it  is  only  too  evident  that  the  Church  has  com- 
pletely lost  its  hold  upon  the  population  by  which  it  is  surrounded.  3.  It  is  impossible 
to  resist  the  conclusion  that  a  large  portion  of  the  clergy  have  mistaken  their  vocation 
in  life.  " 


176  Ecce  Clerus 

of  City  Churches,"  which  appeared  a  few  years  ago  in 
London^  a  journal  of  civic  and  social  progress,  published  in 
the  great  city  whose  name  it  bears,  we  learn  that  there  are 
sixty  churches  in  the  oldest  and  most  central  portion  of  the 
British  metropolis  with  a  total  income  of  over  ^310,000, 
although  the  constantly  dwindling  population  has  fallen  to 
37>7o5'*  The  incumbent  of  All  Hallows,  Barking,  receives 
a  stipend  of  $10,000  a  year  and  a  further  $3,000  a  year  for 
the  maintenance  of  the  church,  while  the  total  population 
of  his  parish  is  447.  At  St,  Andrew,  Undershaft,  with  a 
population  of  218,  the  clergyman  has  a  house,  $10,000  a  year, 
and  an  additional  $1,750  for  the  church.  On  a  recent  occa- 
sion when  the  congregation  was  counted  it  amounted  to  45, 
At  St,  Edmund-the-King  the  incumbent  has  a  house, 
$6,500  a  year,  and  $1,500  annually  for  the  church  account, 
with  172  parishioners;  the  Sunday  congregation  recently 
amounted  to  31  out  of  the  172.  At  St,  Ethelburga,  Bishops- 
gate,  the  stipend  is  $5,250,  with  a  church  account  of  $1,500, 
the  population  being  158,  At  St,  Margaret,  Pattens,  the 
stipend  is  $5,300,  with  a  house;  there  is  a  further  income 
for  the  church  of  $1,500  a  year ;  the  total  population  is  ii6, 
and  the  congregation  on  a  recent  Sunday  was  36.  At  St, 
Catharine,  Coleman,  the  stipend  is  $4,150;  church  account, 
$1,450  ;  population,  237,  In  this  case  the  incumbent  actually 
receives  a  grant  from  the  ecclesiastical  commissioners  for 
the  stipend  of  a  curate.  At  St,  Mary,  Woolnoth,  the  stipend 
is  $6,000  a  year;  church  account,  an  additional  $1,000;  popu- 
lation, 208  ;  congregation,  as  recently  counted,  19,  At  St. 
Stephen,  Walbrook,  the  stipend  is  $4,750  ;  population,  124  ; 
congregation,  13,  At  St,  Olave,  Hart  Street,  the  parson  has 
$10,400,  a  house  and  $1,250  for  church  expenses,  with 
a  population  of  364.  At  St.  Peter-upon-Cornhill  the 
stipend  is  $10,750,  a  house,  with  $1,750  for  church  expenses, 

*  The  city  of  London  proper  extends  only  about  a  mile  in  every  direction  from  St. 
Paul's  Cathedral  as  a  center. 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       177 

and  a  population  of  162.  When  most  of  the  churches  be- 
tween the  Tower  of  London  and  the  Bank  of  England  were 
recently  visited  it  was  found  that  three  of  them  were  actually 
closed.  St.  Magnus,  London  Bridge,  with  a  stipend  of 
$2,900  and  a  church  account  of  $2,500,  was  closed.  St. 
Mary-at-Hill,  with  a  stipend  of  $2,000,  a  church  account  of 
$2,500,  and  a  population  of  173,  was  closed.  St.  George, 
Botolph  Lane,  was  closed,  and  on  the  door,  barred  by  an  iron 
rod,  was  the  following  notice:  "By  order  of  the  Bishop  of 
London,  with  the  consent  of  the  rector  and  church  warden 
of  the  parish,  this  church  will  be  closed  in  consequence  of 
the  unsafe  condition  of  the  fabric  and  the  lack  of  funds  with 
which  to  repair  it."  In  this  case  the  rector.  Rev.  M.  Mac- 
Coll,  M.A.,  a  well-known  writer  in  various  first-class  maga- 
zines, receives  $2,455  ^  year,  a  house,  which  presumably  was 
not  so  much  out  of  repair  as  to  be  unfit  to  live  in,  and  $1,250 
for  the  maintenance  of  the  church.  Inquiry  as  to  what  Mr. 
MacCoU  was  doing  to  repair  the  fabric  and  reopen  the  doors 
of  his  church  failed  to  elicit  any  satisfactory  information. 

While  these  and  other  incredible  scandals  exist  in  one  form 
or  another  in  most  of  the  Churches  is  it  any  marvel  that  Chris- 
tianity fails  to  reach  and  reform  the  wage-earning  classes  ? 
that  a  sullen  alienation  and  apathy,  if  not  latent  antagonism, 
hold  them  far  aloof  from  all  elevating  or  consolatory  moral 
and  spiritual  influences  ?  that  intemperance,  improvidence, 
and  want,  with  all  the  ghastly  catalogue  of  miseries  that 
follow  in  their  train,  abound  ?  and  that  infidelity  and  atheism 
exult  and  triumph  ?  Is  it  not  clear  that  lukewarm  and 
worldly  churches  and  church  members  are  often,  without 
knowing  it,  by  far  the  most  dangerous  and  deadly  enemies 
of  the  religion  they  profess  ? 

4.  Remedies  Suggested* 

The  age  in  which  we  live,  however,  while  markedly  one  of 
doubt,  criticism,  and  studied  reserve  of  judgment,  is  also 
12 


178  Ecce  Clems 

one  of  courage,  hope,  and  enlightened  altruistic  sentiment. 
Thousands  of  thoughtful  men  and  women  have  grown  rest- 
less under  social  and  industrial  arrangements  which  are 
practically  nothing  better  than  organized  abnormities, 
dooming  the  toiler  to  a  condition  of  hopeless  poverty,  priva- 
tion, and  dependence,  and  forcing  the  weak  to  the  wall; 
making  it  increasingly  difficult  for  even  the  virtuously  dis- 
posed to  do  right,  and  increasingly  easier  for  the  viciously 
inclined  to  do  wrong.  There  probably  never  was  a  time 
when  so  much  earnest,  practical  attention  was  given  to  the 
question  of  the  people's  salvation  in  the  broadest  and  most 
comprehensive  sense  of  the  word.  The  last  few  decades 
have  witnessed  a  genuine  renaissance  of  philanthropy — a 
philanthropy  inspired  by  nobler  feelings  and  pledged  to  wiser 
methods  than  the  old  charity  organizations  which  may  be 
said  to  have  had  their  day.  To  this  new  and  deeper  sense 
of  humanity  and  brotherhood  that  has  come  we  are  indebted 
for  the  parliamentary  exertion  of  such  men  as  the  late  Lord 
Shaftesbury  with  a  view  to  the  protection  of  factory  workers 
and  children  under  age,  the  efforts  of  George  Muller,  C.  H. 
Spurgeon,  J.  T.  Barnardo,  George  Peabody,  Loring  Brace, 
and  others,  and  the  ambitious  social  betterment  scheme  of 
General  Booth.  It  has  created  a  distinctive  school  of  social 
and  political  economy.  It  has  produced  a  literature  of  its 
own  in  fiction,  philosophy,  and  economics,  varying  in  style 
and  method  of  treatment  from  Jenkins's  Ginx's  Baby  and 
Riis's  How  the  Other  Half  Lives  to  the  more  philosophical 
Social  Evolution  of  Mr.  Benjamin  Ridd.  It  has  influenced 
legislation,  has  stirred  the  pulpit,  and  tinctured  more  or  less 
deeply  the  current  of  common  thought  and  feeling. 

To  be  sure,  the  remedies  suggested  are  often  crude, 
Utopian,  impracticable,  but  few  of  them  are  without  some 
intrinsic  value  as  steps  toward  the  ultimate  solution.  By 
three  classes  chiefly,  each  of  which  ought  to  be  a  powerful 
factor  in  their  moral  and  social  elevation,  the  people  have 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       179 

been  "severely  let  alone  " — (i)  by  the  wealthy,  (2)  by  the 
intellectual,  (3)  by  the  conventionally  devout.  And  in  each 
of  these  cases  the  law  of  reaction  is  vigorously  asserting 
itself  to-day.  The  protest  against  the  exclusiveness  of 
aristocratic  and  plutocratic  principles  has  come  in  the 
form  of  socialism.  The  reaction  against  contemplative,  not 
to  say  barren  and  contemptuous,  intellectualism  is  found  in 
the  University  Settlement  movement  in  such  cities  as  Lon- 
don, Boston,  Chicago,  with  its  object  of  "  relieving  the  over- 
accumulation  at  one  end  of  society  and  the  destitution  at 
the  other,  as  these  are  most  sorely  felt  in  social  and  educa- 
tional advantage."  The  recoil  from  a  self-absorbed  and 
churchly  piety  declares  itself  in  the  resolute  and  noisy 
evangelism — in  the  drum,  tambourine,  and  stained  and 
tattered  banner  of  the  Salvation  Army  barracks  and  street 
procession.  Curiously  suggestive  was  the  reception  the 
"Army  "  met  with  at  first  from  some  of  the  most  prominent 
leaders  of  the  religious  world.  After  visiting  the  barracks 
of  the  "  Army  "  for  the  first  time,  during  his  stay  in  London, 
Bishop  Phillips  Brooks  wrote  to  his  brother  thus  :  "  I  went 
on  Thursday  to  a  tremendous  dinner  party  at  the  Baroness 
Burdett-Coutts's,  with    swells    as   thick   as    huckleberries. 

Then  for  variety  I  went  on  Thursday  night  with  K to 

an  all-night  meeting  of  the  Salvation  Army,  what  they,  in 
their  disagreeable  lingo  call  *  all-night  with  Jesus.'  They 
close  the  doors  at  eleven  and  do  not  let  anybody  go  out  till 
half  past  four  a.  m.  The  meeting  was  noisy  and  unpleasant, 
but  there  was  nothing  very  bad  about  it,  and  I  am  not  quite 
sure  that  it  might  not  do  good  to  somebody."*  The  transi- 
tion from  "swells  as  thick  as  huckleberries,"  not  one  of 
whom  probably  had  ever  felt  himself  called  upon  to  forego 
a  single  meal  or  deny  himself  the  expense  of  a  choice  button- 
hole flower  for  the  benefit  of  others,  to  "  an  all-night  with 
Jesus,"  whose  object  was  to  bring  divine  strength  and  con- 

*  Letters  o/  Travel,  p.  292. 


180  Ecce  Clems 

solation  to  those  who  by  sin  and  vice  had  forfeited  their 
inheritance  of  hope  for  time  and  eternity,  was  evidently  too 
sudden  for  the  good  bishop.  But  curiously  enough,  though 
no  communion  in  Christendom  cultivates  more  assiduously 
stately  ecclesiastical  forms  and  imposing  ceremonies  than 
that  of  which  Bishop  Brooks  was  so  distinguished  an  orna- 
ment, unless,  indeed,  it  be  that  of  the 

Milk-white  hind,  unspotted  and  unchanged, 

that  Church  is  the  only  one  that  has  cared  to  attempt  any 
direct  imitation  of  the  organization  and  methods  of  the 
"Army;"  and  from  it  the  "Army"  has  obtained  some  of 
the  ablest  and  most  successful  of  its  recent  leaders.  Speak- 
ing of  her  first  acquaintance  with  the  movement,  Mrs.  Maud 
B.  Booth  says :  "  I  heard  them  sometimes  when  the  singing 
sounded  muffled  through  the  stained-glass  windows  of  our 
church,  and  it  could  hardly  have  been  said  to  break  the 
sacred  stillness,  yet  I  could  catch  the  oft-repeated  words, 
*0  you  must  be  a  lover  of  the  Lord,'  and  sometimes  they 
would  come  to  my  ears  mixed  in  a  strange  way  with  the 
familiar  sentence,  *  Lord,  have  mercy  on  us  miserable  sin- 
ners.* Ah,  little  did  I  know  then  that  these  people  were 
sinners  forgiven  seeking  sinners  lost. 

"But  I  pass  at  once  to  days  when  I  learned  to  look 
anxiously  and  lovingly  through  the  rectory  windows  for  the 
approach  of  their  blue-bordered  flag,  until  I  pause  at  the 
day  when  I  myself,  in  an  'Army '  hall,  saw  Jesus  my  Saviour 
as  I  never  had  seen  him  before,  and  gave  up  my  life  entirely 
to  God — my  God,  the  *  Army's '  God,  and  the  drunkard's 
God.  Then  I  received  into  my  heart  the  love  and  fire  that 
have  sent  me  forth  to  do  God's  will  and  to  follow  the  steps 
of  Christ  of  Calvary.*  "  The  whole  secret  of  the  "Army's  " 
success,  as  General  Booth  assured  the  present  writer  during 
some  pleasant  hours  spent  together,  some  years  ago,  on  the 

♦  Beneath  Two  Flags,  pp.  6,  7. 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       181 

eastern  coast  of  England,  is  its  absolute  freedom  from  con- 
ventional forms  of  reverence  and  solemnity. 

1.  Now,  as  to  all  schemes  of  salvation  which  look  toward 
a  reconstruction  of  society  on  a  socialistic  basis,  it  may  be 
objected  that,  though  of  the  most  comprehensive  and  most 
radical  character,  and  consequently  difficult  of  realization, 
they  yet  propose  to  risk  everything  on  a  doubtful  experi- 
ment; and,  further,  that  they  propound  legislative,  economic, 
and  industrial  remedies  for  what,  after  all,  is,  at  root,  a  moral 
disease.  "So  far,"  says  Mrs.  Ward,  "as  socialism  means  a 
political  system — the  trampling  out  of  private  enterprise  and 
competition,  and  all  the  rest  of  it — I  find  myself  slipping 
away  from  it  more  and  more.  .  .  .  As  I  go  about  among  the 
wage-earners  the  emphasis — do  what  I  will — comes  to  lie 
less  and  less  on  possession,  more  and  more  on  character.  I 
go  to  two  tenements  in  the  same  building.  One  is  hell — the 
other  heaven.  Why  ?  Both  belong  to  well-paid  artisans 
with  equal  opportunities.  Both,  as  far  as  I  can  see,  might 
have  a  decent  life  of  it.  But  one  is  a  man,  the  other,  with 
all  his  belongings,  will  soon  be  a  vagabond." 

2.  Precisely  the  same  objection  of  inadequacy  may  be 
urged  against  the  University  Settlement  scheme.  It  is 
doubtless  quite  true  that  **  the  best  speculative  philosophy," 
to  use  the  words  of  Miss  Addam,  "  sets  forth  the  solidarity  of 
the  human  race;  that  the  highest  moralists  have  taught  that 
without  the  advance  and  improvement  of  the  whole  no  man 
can  hope  for  any  lasting  improvement  in  his  own  moral  and 
material  individual  condition  ;  "  that  "  nothing  so  deadens 
the  sympathies  and  shrivels  the  power  of  enjoyment  as  the 
persistent  keeping  away  from  the  great  opportunities  of  help- 
fulness and  a  continual  ignoring  of  the  starvation  struggle 
which  makes  up  the  life  of  at  least  half  the  race."*  Still  it  is 
important  that  we  recognize  the  real  nature  and  full  extent  of 
the  work  we  propose  to  do,  and  resolutely  prepare  ourselves, 

*  Philanthropy  and  Social  Progress^  p.  ii. 


182  Ecce  Clerus 

at  whatever  cost,  to  comply  with  the  only  conditions  which 
promise  genuine  and  enduring  success.  Nothing  is  more 
certain  of  ultimate  failure  than  a  scheme  of  amelioration 
which  makes  no  direct  appeal  to  man's  spiritual  nature  and 
ignores  his  need  of  moral  transformation  by  the  grace  of  God. 
3.  With  the  immense  advantage  conferred  by  this  con- 
viction the  Salvation  Army  has  brought  new  life  and 
hope  to  thousands  who  must  have  perished  without  its 
aid.  During  the  three  decades  of  its  existence  it  has  ex- 
tended its  operations  to  every  continent  and  to  almost 
every  civilized  country  of  the  globe.  And  yet,  though 
by  no  means  lacking  in  courage,  resolution,  and  fertility 
of  expedient,  its  poverty  of  material  sources,  the  few- 
ness of  its  steadfast  and  reliable  adherents  in  any  given 
locality,  and  the  backward  state  of  education  among  its 
local  leaders  will  always  be  in  marked  contrast  with  the 
magnitude  of  its  plans  and  of  the  problem  that  confronts  it. 
While  scarcely  anything  could  be  better  adapted  to  save 
men  from  the  slum  and  the  gutter,  hardly  any  form  of 
Christianity  could  be  more  ill  suited  to  develop  the  many- 
sided  nature  of  man  when  once  restored  to  himself.  It  is, 
in  fact,  as  it  professes  to  be,  an  empire  under  despotic 
military  rule ;  not  a  Christian  Church  after  the  New  Testa- 
ment type,  seeking  under  constitutional  spiritual  government 
and  the  sacramental  forms  and  ministries  instituted  by 
Christ*  to  develop  individual  character  and  leaven  the  world 
with  eternal  principles  of  morality  and  religion.  As  an  autoc- 
racy it  is  opposed  to  the  whole  genius  and  spirit  of  Christian- 
ity, and  is  a  glaring  anachronism  in  an  intensely  democratic 
age.  Nor  are  there  lacking  evidences  within  its  own  ranks 
of  its  want  of  harmony  with  the  requirements  of  the  time.f 

*  Eph.  IV,  11-14. 

+  Since  this  chapter  was  written  the  rebellion  of  Mr.  Ballington  Booth,  leader  of  the 
"Army"  in  America,  against  the  autocratic  rule  of  his  father,  the  general,  has  taken 
place,  leading  to  the  organization  of  a  separate  movement,  much  to  the  disappointment 
and  regret  of  the  general's  family,  as  the  present  writer  recently  learned  from  his 
sister,  Mrs.  Booth-Tucker,  of  New  York. 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       183 

Even  among  those  who  were  born  in  the  household  in 
which  it  also  had  its  birth,  whose  natural  and  spiritual  life 
was  cradled  to  the  strains  of  its  rude  but  rousing  music, 
who  have  labored,  planned,  and  prayed  for  its  expansion, 
who  have  born  its  "  banner  with  a  strange  device  "  through 
many  a  storm  and  carried  its  message  of  life  and  salvation 
into  many  a  dark  and  dismal  alley  of  the  city,  there  appear 
symptoms  of  dissatisfaction  with  its  rigid  and  inelastic 
polity — its  unyielding  and  merciless  despotism. 

5.  The  True  Solution* 

The  more  thoroughly  the  problem  of  the  salvation  of  the 
unreached  majority  is  considered  the  more  plainly  will  it 
appear  that  responsibility  for  its  true  solution  rests  with  the 
ministry  and  membership  of  the  organized  Christian  Church. 
It  is  not  the  manner  of  God  to  impose  obligation  where 
there  is  not  sufficient  power  and  opportunity  to  meet  it. 
The  rule  of  heaven,  in  this  as  in  other  things,  is  a  law  of 
truth  and  equity.  "To  whom  much  is  given  of  him  will 
much  be  required."  The  Churches  have  the  talent,  the 
education,  the  moral  stamina,  the  spiritual  experience,  the 
social  prestige,  the  historical  antecedents,  the  pecuniary 
resources,  the  unbroken  record  of  mercy  and  philanthropy, 
and  the  divine  authorization  required  to  inaugurate  and 
sustain  a  general  movement  for  the  moral,  social,  and 
spiritual  redemption  of  the  people.  All  that  is  needed  is  a 
full  and  frank  recognition  of  their  responsibility  and  the 
intelligent  and  hearty  adoption  of  some  course  of  action  in 
harmony  therewith. 

The  first  result  of  such  recognition  will  be  an  effort  to 
get  near  the  people  and  devise  some  practical  method  of 
reconciling  the  obvious  social  tendencies  of  Christianity,  on 
the  one  hand,  with  its  avowed  spiritual  mission  and  sym- 
pathies, on  the  other.  These  tendencies  and  sympathies  are 
Oow  in  hopeless  conflict.     Religion  tends  legitimately  and 


184  Ecce  Clerus 

inevitably  toward  the  creation  of  wealth  and  the  promotion 
of  education,  intelligence,  refined  taste,  exalted  character. 
The  most  natural  result  of  its  active  principles  is  to  quicken 
thought,  encourage  noble  aspiration  and  endeavor,  and  con- 
fer reputation,  capacity,  status,  manhood.  On  the  other 
hand,  it  is  part  of  its  very  essence  to  insist  on  self-denial 
and  self-sacrifice;  on  tenderness,  pity,  and  considerateness 
toward  others;  on  genuine  sympathy  with  the  lowly,  the 
needy,  the  fallen,  and  the  lost.  It  calls  for  the  cultivation  of  a 
warm  and  vivid  sense  of  brotherhood  and  positively  forbids 
the  creation  of  a  social  chasm  between  the  Church  and 
those  outside  her  pale. 

Jesus  affected  no  carefully  guarded  seclusion  like  Buddha 
or  Mohammed  ;  no  superiority  of  caste  like  the  modern 
Brahman.  He  loved  the  people,  encouraged  their  approach, 
lived,  taught,  dispensed  his  healing  ministrations  in  the 
midst  of  them.  The  companions  of  his  choice  were  taken 
from  the  masses  and  remained  in  loving  touch  with  them. 
"The  common  people  heard  him  gladly."  As  of  the  im- 
personal Wisdom  of  the  Old  Testament  it  is  said,  "  His 
delights  were  with  the  sons  of  men,"  so  at  the  close  of  the 
New  Testament  canon  it  is  solemnly  reiterated,  "Behold, 
the  tabernacle  of  God  is  with  men,  and  he  will  dwell  with 
them,  and  they  shall  be  his  people,  and  God  himself  shall  be 
with  them — their  God."  * 

Among  the  people  Christianity,  as  a  vital  and  active 
force,  had  its  start,  and  with  the  people  it  is  destined  for- 
ever to  abide  or  perish.  "  To  help  the  world,"  says  Miss 
French,  "  we  must  take  it  as  we  find  it,  and  we  find  men 
and  women  with  trivial  perplexities  and  interests  ready  and 
longing  for  the  life  which  is  of  God.  .  .  . 

"  To  reach  the  people  who  are,  in  some  senses,  below 
you,  you  must  touch  them  first  on  their  own  plane,  show 
that  you  are  interested  in  the  things — trivial  though  they 

♦  Rev.  xxi,  3. 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       185 

often  are — that  interest  them,  and  then  you  can  by  degrees 
raise  them  to  your  own  plane.  This  mounting  a  stage, 
stretching  a  hand  down  to  some  one  on  the  ground,  and  ex- 
pecting that  person  to  keep  pace  with  you  as  you  run  along, 
is  not  practical ;  it  is  too  much  of  a  strain  on  the  other  per- 
son's muscle." 

To  get  back  to  the  people,  then ;  to  take  Christ  to  them 
in  our  living  personality — in  our  whole  life  as  having  to  do 
with  society,  politics,  and  trade  ;  with  science,  art,  and  lit- 
erature ;  with  legislation,  government,  industrial  improve- 
ment, and  church  enterprise — that  is  the  first  necessary  step 
toward  reaching  and  reclaiming  the,  as  yet,  unevangelized 
millions  of  the  people. 

Along  with  this  sympathy  with  the  unchurched  multi- 
tudes will  come  the  power  and  facility  to  recognize  their 
ideals  and  to  interpret  their  best  thoughts  and  aspirations 
without  insisting  on  translating  them  into  the,  often  to 
them,  unintelligible  lingo  of  religion.  Whoever  will  study 
carefully  the  political  watchwords  and  party  cries  of  wage- 
earners  will  find  that  they  are  not  such  total  strangers  to 
noble  conceptions  of  life  as  they  are  sometimes  supposed  to 
be.  Often  they  will  be  found  to  be  blindly  craving  the  very 
boon  religion  offers  as  its  highest  good.  For  example,  on 
every  public  structure  of  any  pretensions  in  the  city  of  Paris 
the  visitor  sees  inscribed  the  gospel  of  the  Revolution — Lib- 
erty, Equality,  Fraternity.  Could  anything  be  grander  than 
the  ideal  of  social  relation  embodied  in  those  potent  words.-* 
As  one  of  the  most  scholarly  and  influential  of  English 
bishops  has  recently  pointed  out,  that  revolutionary  triad 
which  captured  the  imagination  of  millions  of  workingmen 
in  Europe  are  nothing  more  than  the  social  application  of 
the  Pauline  triad,  "  Righteousness,  peace,  and  joy  in  the 
Holy  Ghost."  And  when  the  religion  which  yields  right- 
eousness, peace,  and  joy  in  the  Holy  Ghost  in  the  indi- 
vidual soul  dominates  public  as  well  as  private  life,  then 


186  Ecce  Clerus 

will  have  come  safely  and  beneficently  the  reign  of  Liberty, 
Equality,  Fraternity,  in  a  deeper  and  broader  sense  than 
has  been  hitherto  dreamed  of. 

The  people  are  not  slow  to  appreciate  any  genuine  effort 
to  understand  and  benefit  them.  "The  child  of  the  peo- 
ple," says  Paul  Sabatier  of  St.  Francis  d'Assisi;  "he  knew 
all  their  material  and  moral  woes  and  their  mysterious 
echoes  sounded  in  his  heart."  *  Was  not  this  the  secret  of 
Paul's  power  over  men  wherever  he  went — the  key  to  such 
scenes  as  that  which  transpired  at  his  parting  with  the 
Ephesian  elders  on  the  Milesian  shore  .-*  Was  it  not  the 
secret  of  Wyclif  s  success  in  sowing  broadcast,  by  means  of 
his  poor  friars,  the  word  of  God  in  the  England  of  his  day  ? 
The  secret,  too,  of  Luther's,  of  Wesley's,  of  Whitefield's,  of 
Bunyan's,  of  Spurgeon's,  of  Moody's,  of  General  Booth's 
work  ?  From  first  to  last  the  religion  of  Jesus  has  in  wiew 
the  sorrows,  temptations,  trials,  and  spiritual  necessities  of 
the  people  ;  and,  instead  of  crying  to  them  from  afar,  it 
hastens  to  the  spot  where  they  suffer  to  offer  its  help  and 
leave  its  quenchless  ray  of  light  and  joy.  As  Professor 
Drummond  points  out,  "  Its  purpose  is  by  means  of  the  Chris- 
tian society  to  give  the  world  liberty,  comfort,  beauty,  joy. 
This  program  deals  with  a  real  world.  Think  of  it  as  you 
read,  not  of  the  surface  world,  but  of  the  world  as  it  is,  as  it 
sins  and  weeps  and  curses  and  suffers  and  sends  up  its  long 
cry  to  God.  Limit  it,  if  you  like,  to  the  world  around  your 
door,  but  think  of  it — of  the  city  and  the  hospital  and  the 
dungeon  and  the  graveyard  ;  of  the  sweating-shop  and 
the  pawnshop  and  the  drinkshop  ;  think  of  the  cold,  the 
cruelty,  the  fever,  the  famine,  the  ugliness,  the  loneliness,  the 
pain.  And  then  try  to  keep  down  the  lump  in  your  throat 
as  you  take  up  his  program  and  read,  *To  bind  up  the 
brokenhearted ;  to  proclaim  liberty  to  the  captives  ;  to 
comfort  all  that  mourn  ;  to  give  unto  them  beauty  for  ashes, 

♦  Life  of  Francis  d'Assisi,  p.  15. 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       187 

the  oil  of  joy  for  mourning,  the  garment  of  praise  for  the 
spirit  of  heaviness.'  " 

Finally,  when  the  Christian  Church  and  ministry  are  re- 
solved to  stand  fearlessly  full  front  to  the  obvious  duty  of 
the  hour,  they  will  put  themselves  unequivocally  on  record 
against  all  forms  of  evil  that  antagonize  and  imperil  the 
present  and  eternal  well-being  of  the  people,  degrading  and 
cheapening  their  toil,  debasing  their  social  pleasures  and 
amusements,  corrupting  their  morals,  draining  their  re- 
sources, cursing  and  embittering  their  lives.  There  will  be 
no  more  disposition  to  indulge  in  the  easy  duty  of  color- 
less deprecation  of  sin  in  general,  but  there  will  be  plain, 
straight,  definite  preaching  of  evangelical  repentance,  show- 
ing sin  as  it  is,  in  its  dark  nature,  enslaving  power,  and 
ruinous  effects ;  exhibiting  it  as  it  lives  in  trade,  in  politics, 
in  social  usages  and  phenomena  ;  individual  sin,  collective 
and  corporate  sin,  class  selfishness,  class  prejudices  and 
antagonisms  ;  the  whole  bad  heritage  of  centuries  as  it  has 
been  allowed  to  crystallize  in  the  antichristian  principles, 
laws,  and  customs  of  to-day. 

Specifically  against  war,  intemperance,  licentiousness, 
greed,  gambling,  narcotism,  and  vile  literature  will  the 
warning  word  of  an  awakened  ministry  be  definite,  decisive, 
outspoken,  continuous.  These  surely  are  the  "seven  last 
plagues  "  reserved  in  the  retributive  providence  of  God  for 
a  wayward  and  rebellious  race.  In  these,  whatever  may  be 
hidden  from  our  sight  in  the  shadowy  background  of  the 
future,  "  the  wrath  of  God  is  revealed  from  heaven  upon  all 
ungodliness  and  unrighteousness  of  men  who  hold  down  the 
truth  in  unrighteousness."* 

The  civilized  world  of  to-day  is  little  cognizant  of  the  in- 
sidious manner  in  which  all  that  is  most  precious  and  most 
ennobling  in  human  life,  character,  and  destiny  is  con- 
stantly threatened  by  evils  which  even   the  victims  them- 

*Rom.  i,  i8. 


188  Ecce  Clenis 

selves  often  regard  with  in  appalling  levity.  Take  the  item 
of  war,  for  example.  Leaving  out  of  sight  the  bloodshed  and 
slaughter,  the  hardship  and  suffering,  the  waste  of  treasure 
and  destruction  of  property,  of  actual  conflict,  the  mere 
preparation  for  it  imposes  a  burden  beneath  which  humanity 
groans  with  an  increasing  sense  of  oppression  and  restless- 
ness. In  introducing  a  measure  a  few  years  ago  in  the 
British  House  of  Commons  for  the  reduction  of  the  "  bloated 
armaments"  of  Europe,  in  the  interests  of  "justice,  hu- 
manity, and  religion,"  Sir  John  Lubbock  contended  that, 
whatever  might  be  the  case  in  dealing  with  barbarous  tribes, 
the  resort  of  civilized  nations  to  exhibitions  of  brute  force 
was  "  repugnant  not  only  to  our  moral  but  also  to  our 
common  sense."  In  the  course  of  his  argument  that  distin- 
guished scientist  and  statesman  disclosed  the  astounding 
fact  that  at  the  time  of  his  speaking  the  peace  establish- 
ments of  Europe  comprised  3,500,000  men,  the  war  estab- 
lishments over  10,000,000 ;  that  when  the  proposed  ar- 
rangements for  enlarging  the  armies,  then  being  made  by 
infatuated  rulers  of  Europe,  had  been  carried  out  20,000,000 
men  would  be  ready  to  slaughter  one  another.  Even  the 
nominal  cost  of  these  insane  and  wicked  arrangements  was 
over  $1,000,000,000  a  year.  But,  as  the  continental  armies 
were  to  a  great  extent  under  the  degrading  yoke  of  the  con- 
scription, the  actual  cost  was  far  larger.  If  all  this  did  not 
end  in  war,  it  led  to  ruin  and  bankruptcy.  During  the  last 
twenty  years  the  debt  of  Italy  had  risen  from  $2,415,000,000 
to  $2,580,000,000  ;  that  of  Austria  from  $1,700,000,000  to 
$2,900,000,000 ;  that  of  Russia  from  $1,700,000,000  to  $3,- 
750,000,000 ;  that  of  France  from  $2,500,000,000  to  $6,500,- 
000,000.  In  1890  Herr  Richter  stated  in  the  German  Par- 
liament (Reichstag)  that  since  1870  Germany  had  expended 
$2,400,000,000  on  its  army.  In  1870  the  government  debts 
of  civilized  nations  aggregated  $20,000,000,000.  In  1890 
they  had  reached  the  startling  sum  of  $30,000,000,000,  and 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       189 

were  still  increasing.  *  In  fact,  as  Sir  John  Lubbock  re- 
marks, there  never  is  any  peace  under  such  a  condition  of 
affairs.  Nations  live  "  practically  in  a  permanent  state  of 
war,  happily  without  battles  or  bloodshed,  but  not  without 
terrible  suffering."  One  third  of  the  whole  national  income 
of  Great  Britain  is  spent  in  paying  for  the  wars  of  ances- 
tors ;  one  third  in  preparing  for  future  wars  ;  one  third  only 
is  used  to  promote  the  well-being  and  happiness  of  the  cit- 
izens. And  the  military  craze  is  hardly  less  felt  on  this 
side  the  Atlantic.  Already  the  demand  for  forts  and  fleets 
and  convenient  naval  coaling  stations  is  involving  the  nation 
in  the  expenditure  of  millions  of  dollars.  All  this  in  spite 
of  the  indisputable  fact  that  the  prosperity,  happiness,  and 
independence  of  nations  everywhere  bear  a  strict  propor- 
tion not  to  their  military  and  naval  strength,  but  to  their 
moral  and  intellectual  training.  "Switzerland  spends  as 
much  money  on  education  as  on  soldiers  and  their  costly 
equipment ;  Denmark  half  as  much,  and  Belgium  about  a 
third,  and  these  are  all  prosperous  and  contented  little 
States.  But  the  great  empires  which  clutch  territory  and 
ignore  men  spend  prodigally  upon  their  armies  and  parsi- 

*  In  an  article  in  the  Nineteenth  Century  for  May,  1898,  an  English  writer,  having 
access  to  reliable  sources  of  information,  points  out  that  "  Europe  is  piling  up  its  ex- 
penditure on  armaments  in  an  alarming  manner  to  the  sacrifice  of  sound  finance." 
He  shows  that  the  military  expenditure  of  England  between  1868  and  1896  rose  from 
$130,000,000  to  $201,000,000;  that  of  France  from  $100,500,000  to  $180,000,000;  that  of 
Russia  from  $82,000,000  to  $157,500,000  ;  that  of  Italy  from  $42,000,000  to  $75,000,000  ; 
that  of  Austria  from  $40,000,000  to  $75,000,000  ;  that  of  Germany  from  $53,500,000  to 
$156,500,000 — an  increase  of  78.6  per  cent,  while  the  populations  in  these  six  States  had 
only  advanced  44  per  cent.  To  this  must  be  added  the  enormous  and  steadily  increas- 
ing items  of  naval  expenditure  for  these  countries,  some  idea  of  which  may  be  ob- 
tained from  the  fact,  as  stated  by  an  authority  in  the  British  navy  (Sir  W.  H.  White, 
Director  of  Naval  Construction),  that  from  April  i,  1887,  to  March  31,  1898,  there  has 
been  spent  on  ships,  machinery,  gun  mounting,  etc. — exclusive  of  guns  and  ammuni- 
tion, which  of  themselves  cost  $66,000,000 — very  nearly  $247,500,000.  In  the  seventy- 
four  years  preceding  1887  the  increase  in  naval  expenditure  had  aggregated  $135,- 
000,000;  for  the  past  /f«  ^^ari- the  increase  has  been  $285,000,000.  Well  might  Sir  W. 
H.  White  say,  "  These  are  striking  figures."  Nor  have  our  distance  from  Europe  and 
hitherto  avowed  attachment  to  the  Monroe  doctrine  preserved  us  from  the  contagion  of 
this  warlike  passion.  A  chaplain  of  the  United  States  navy  informs  us  that  during 
the  past  fifteen  years  we  have  appropriated  $387,987,840  for  ships  and  guns — almost 
half  that  sum  within  the  last  five  years.  And  yet  the  outbreak  of  the  late  war  between 
Spain  and  this  country  found  us  none  too  well  prepared.  Not  too  soon  has  a  leading 
actor  in  this  gigantic  conspiracy  against  the  peace  and  well-being  of  the  world  proposed 
a  pause.  Meanwhile  the  civilized  world  will  await  with  anxiety  the  result  of  the  con- 
templated International  Congress  on  the  Czar  of  Russia's  proposals. 


190  Ecce  Clerus 

raoniously  on  their  people.  In  Prussia  education  obtains 
scarcely  a  fifth  of  the  amount  lavished  on  preparations  for 
war  ;  in  England  only  one  sixth  the  amount ;  in  Italy  less 
than  a  tenth  ;  and  in  Russia  five  hundred  dollars  are  squan- 
dered on  turning  peasants  into  soldiers  for  every  five  spent 
on  making  peasants  fitter  to  perform  their  duties  in  the 
world."  *  As  one  has  justly  observed,  "  What  drinking  is 
in  the  individual,  militarism  is  in  the  race,  a  sort  of  national 
drunkenness  ;  a  lust  of  pride  of  power  of  blood.  In  the 
mad  temper  of  war  everything  else  is  submerged." 

The  havoc  and  misery  wrought  by  drink  are  apparent 
everywhere,  and  the  mere  transfer  to  other  industries  of  the 
money  now  embarked  in  the  liquor  trade  would  imme- 
diately secure  for  every  human  being  ample  work  and  wages. 
The  liquor  trade  is  the  one  of  all  others  which  gives  the 
minimum  of  the  product  of  industry  to  labor  and  the  maxi- 
mum to  capital.  For  every  twenty-five  dollars  spent  on 
shoes  from  eight  to  ten  go  to  the  workman.  For  every 
twenty-five  spent  on  earthenware  from  ten  to  eleven  go  to 
the  wage-earner.  For  every  twenty-five  spent  on  drink  not 
more  than  a  dollar  goes  to  compensate  labor.  In  the  north 
of  England  a  large  and  well-known  iron  company  with  a 
capital  of  $7,500,000  employs  3,000  men.  In  Scotland  a 
large  distillery  of  the  same  capital  employs  150.  Brewers 
and  distillers  quickly  become  millionaires,  and  the  gains 
of  the  trade  offer  a  powerful  inducement  to  men  to  leave 
useful  and  honorable  industries  and  callings  and  seek  the 
more  profitable  employment  of  saloon-keepers ;  f  while  in 
prohibition  States  like  Maine,  for  example,  it  is  impossible 

♦  Address  delivered  before  the  Irish  Literary  Society  by  Sir  Charles  Gavan  Duffy. 

+  A  Cincinnati  Methodist  minister,  writing  to  the  London  Methodist  Times,  says  of 
that  city's  population  of  300,000,  54,000  are  Germans.  The  Germans  run  the  city,  and 
the  brewers  run  the  Germans.  There  are  as  many  breweries  as  Methodist  churches, 
and  more  than  twice  as  many  people  employed  in  the  liquor  business  as  are  members 
of  Methodist  churches.  Poverty  is  so  rife  that  the  secretary  of  the  Associated  Chari- 
ties says  there  are  70,000  poor  who  never  deposit  a  dollar  in  a  bank  or  saving  society. 
Pauperism,  vice,  and  crime  keep  the  asylums  and  prisons  crowded,  and  the  workhouse 
is  in  the  midst  of  a  dull  season  when  it  contains  less  than  6uo  inmates. 


The  Christian  Ministry  and  the  Masses       191 

to  enforce  the  prohibitory  law  because  a  profit  of  eighty 
per  cent  constitutes  a  temptation  to  run  the  risk  of 
raiding,  arrest,  and  fine  or  imprisonment  too  great  to  be 
resisted.  Of  intemperance  and  the  Hquor  trade  licen- 
tiousness in  its  worst  forms  is  the  twin  sister,  while  gam- 
bling, narcotism,  the  foul  print,  and  the  obscene  drama,  as 
birds  of  similar  feather,  haunt  the  same  resorts.  Who  can 
contemplate  the  colossal  magnitude  and  sleepless  activity 
of  these  foes  of  human  purity  and  peace  without  feeling 
that  the  time  has  well  arrived  for  a  dead-lift  effort  on  the 
part  of  all  who  love  the  souls  of  men  to  raise  and  attune  the 
public  heart  and  mind  to  the  high  measure  of  that  grand 
hymn  of  paradise  wherewith  the  happy  parents  of  our  race, 
according  to  Milton,  began  their  morning  toils  ? 

Hail,  universal  Lord  !  be  bounteous  still 
To  give  us  only  good,  and  if  the  night 
Has  gathered  aught  of  evil  or  concealed, 
Disperse  it,  as  now  light  dispels  the  dark, 

that  thus  by  the  united  prayer,  faith,  and  self-denying 
exertions  of  the  thousands  of  Christian  ministers  and  the 
millions  of  Christian  people,  a  quicker  approximation  may 
be  made  to  the  ideal  Christian  state  and  civilization;  where 
the  laws  shall  be  administered  equally  to  all  in  the  name  of 
justice  and  humanity;  where  the  poor,  sick,  and  lonesome 
shall  be  wisely  and  tenderly  cared  for  ;  where  children  and 
youth  shall  be  trained  in  noble  thoughts  and  courteous  man- 
ners and  lofty  ideals  ;  where  art  and  literature  and  science 
shall  flourish  ;  where  the  welfare  of  all  shall  be  the  delight 
and  solicitude  of  each;  that  fair  city  of  God,  in  a  word, 
which  the  last  of  the  apostles  saw  descending  in  spotless 
and  transparent  beauty  out  of  heaven  from  God ;  where 
tears  are  no  more ;  where  the  voice  of  complaining  is  not 
heard  in  the  streets ;  where  disease  and  pauperism  and 
crime  and  drunkenness  and  gambling  and  debauchery  are 
forgotten  insanities  of  a  dismal  and  buried  past. 


192  Ecce  Clerus 


CHAPTER  IX 
Missions  and  Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Centwry 

Kal  eldov  alTiov  ayye'kov  nerdfievov  iv  fiEaovpavfifiari  ixovra  evaYye?.iov 
aluDiov  evayyeMoai  enl  rovg  Kadt^/xtvovg  enl  Tijq  yijq  Koi  inl  nav  idvog  /cat 
^vX^  Kal  yXuaaav  koX  7m6v. — Apocalypse  of  yohn. 

\.  Christianity  an  Apocalypse* 

The  genius  of  Christianity  is  essentially  apocalyptic  and 
prophetic.  It  makes  no  pretense  of  having  invented  the 
great  moral  remedy  it  offers  for  the  sins  and  sorrows  of 
mankind,  nor  claims  to  have  originated  the  sovereign  truths 
it  proclaims,  but  only  to  make  a  plain  announcement  of 
verities  as  old  as  God  and  as  immutable  and  enduring  as 
the  eternal  nature.  This  characteristic  was  distinctly  per- 
ceived and  duly  emphasized  at  the  outset,  and  its  divine 
author  is  accordingly  designated  "  a  light  for  the  unveiling 
{dnoKdXvrpLg)  of  the  nations."  The  aim  of  the  new  evangel 
is  not  only  to  remove  from  men's  souls  the  veil  of  darkness 
beneath  which  the  world  of  spiritual  and  eternal  realities, 
with  its  exhaustless  wealth  of  truth,  beauty,  power,  and 
blessedness  has  so  long  and  so  completely  lain  concealed, 
but  to  disclose  to  the  heathen  mind  the  unsuspected  value 
of  the  fragmentary  and  distorted  truths  it  may  still  retain 
— the  hidden  and  residual  meaning  of  its  myths,  legends, 
and  traditions,  and  to  point  out  the  goal  toward  which  its 
religious  thought  and  aspiration  have  toiled  through  many 
weary  centuries  in  vain.  Where  culture  and  philosophy 
have  been  obliged  to  halt,  and  in  confession  of  their  limita- 
tions, have  erected,  on  the  confines  of  their  narrow  domain, 
the  pathetic  memorial  of  a  hopeless  search — an  altar  "to 
an  Unknown  God" — the  Christian  evangel  extends  the 
frontier  of  religious  knowledge  ;  widens  the  empire  of  light 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         193 

and  certainty ;  says  even  of  the  Unsearchable  himself, 
"He  is  not  far  from  each  one  of  us;  for  in  him  we  live,  and 
move,  and  have  our  being."  The  entire  address  of  the 
apostle  Paul  to  the  men  of  Athens  is  a  striking  example  of 
the  way  in  which  Christianity,  intelligently  and  skillfully 
interpreted  and  applied,  is  capable  of  exhuming  and  re- 
vitalizing the  buried  treasures  of  the  ethnic  mind.  Instead 
of  being  jealous  of  truths  discovered  outside  its  own  authen- 
tic records — instead  of  being  like  Isaac  Walton's  "  River  of 
Epirus,"  whose  waters  put  out  every  lighted  torch  and 
lighted  every  one  which  had  been  extinguished,  it  welcomes 
every  ray  that  relieves  the  darkness  of  the  soul,  and  refuses 
to  "  break  the  bruised  reed  or  quench  the  smoking  flax." 

"  Deep-seated  in  our  mystic  frame "  are  hidden  truths 
whose  profounder  meaning  has  never  yet  been  unfolded  to 
human  thought.  Whatever  may  be  the  state  of  intellectual 
atrophy  or  moral  degradation  in  which  man  is  anywhere 
found,  he  is  always  innately  nobler  than  he  seems.  The 
traces  of  God's  image  in  him  are  often  too  obscure  and 
faint  to  be  easily  detected,  yet  when  he  is  better  understood 
there  are  found,  shining 

Through  all  his  earthly  dress 
Bright  shoots  of  everlastingness. 

In  the  depths  of  the  soul  the  glory  of  God  is  written 
in  plainer  and  more  enduring  script  than  on  the  mid- 
night sky,  and  to  the  infinite  of  thought  and  the  greatness 
of  the  soul  philosophy  and  religion  owe  a  deeper  debt 
than  to  the  infinite  of  space  and  the  magnitude  of  material 
nature.  Nowhere  and  at  no  time  has  the  eternal  Wisdom 
disowned  mankind.  From  of  old  he  has  "rejoiced  in  the 
habitable  part  of  the  earth,  and  his  delights  are  with  the 

sons  of  men." 

In  joy  and  inward  peace,  or  sense 

Of  sorrow  over  sin, 
He  is  his  own  best  evidence ; 
His  witness  is  within. 
13 


194  Ecce  Clerus 

No  fable  old,  no  mythic  lore, 

Nor  dream  of  bards  and  seers  ; 
No  dead  fact  stranded  on  the  shore 
Of  the  oblivious  years. 

But  warm,  sweet,  tender  even  yet 
A  present  help  is  He. 

"  God  has  never  left  himself  without  witness.  But  in 
every  nation  he  that  feareth  him,  and  worketh  righteousness, 
is  accepted  of  him." 

2»  A  Hundred  Years  of  Missions. 

To  facts  like  these  a  century  of  missionary  labor  and  ex- 
periment, of  partial  success  and  partial  failure,  has  given 
a  nobler  import  and  a  larger  value  than  they  ever  had 
before.  It  was  hardly  to  be  expected  that  in  complete 
ignorance  of  the  history  and  character  of  the  various  types  of 
the  ethnic  mind,  of  its  religions,  philosophies,  sacred  litera- 
tures, beliefs,  ideals,  and  idioms  of  thought,  the  best  methods 
of  dealing  with  it  should  be  at  first  adopted  or  the  best 
results  obtained.  Indeed,  it  is  astounding  that  with  small 
and  unpromising  beginnings,  with  an  utterly  inadequate 
equipment  and  a  precarious  support,  and  in  the  face  of  thou- 
sands of  difficulties,  the  early  missions  of  the  present  cen- 
tury should  have  made  so  profound  and  enduring  an  im- 
pression on  the  heathen  world  and  have  reaped  so  large 
a  measure  of  success.  The  successful  evangelization  of 
nearly  three  millions  of  heathen  people  and  the  planting 
and  maintenance  of  several  thousands  of  churches  and 
schools,  together  with  the  translation  of  the  Scriptures,  in 
whole  or  in  part,  into  three  hundred  different  tongues  and 
dialects,  and  the  wide  diffusion  of  some  of  the  best  reli- 
gious literature  of  modern  times,  is  an  achievement  whose 
full  significance  it  is  difficult  to  estimate. 

But  that  is  not  all.  Down  to  a  period  "  within  the  mem- 
ory of  living  men  the  classic  lands  of  history,  of  the  Bible, 
and  of  romance  were  surrounded  with  high  walls  and  gates 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         195 

barred  against  Christian  missionaries.  The  Turkish  empire, 
the  Mogul  empire,  the  Chinese  empire,  the  empire  of  Japan, 
and  that  of  Morocco  were  all  in  this  manner  fenced  around. 
The  remote  parts  of  Africa  were  guarded  by  darkness  and 
death  themselves.  And  in  southern  Europe  rare  were  the 
spots  where  it  was  not  an  offense,  punishable  by  the  police, 
to  circulate  the  Bible,  or  to  preach  or  to  worship  except 
under  forms  prescribed.  But  over  the  walls  has  passed  the 
scepter  which  eye  seeth  not,  and  they  who  before  could  only 
blow  slender  blasts  outside  the  ramparts  now  march  up 
straight  before  them,  and  in  the  name  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
enter  in." 

But  the  most  striking  result  of  missionary  toil  and  devo- 
tion during  the  period  was  probably  the  last  to  be  antici- 
pated, as  it  certainly  is  the  most  doubtful  and  most  dis- 
quieting in  its  character  and  tendency.  The  object  sought 
and  hoped  for  was  the  multiplication  of  docile  and  devoted 
Christian  disciples,  but  a  large  portion  of  the  harvest  is 
found  to  be  a  number  of  dispassionate  investigators  and 
keenly  questioning  critics.  The  latent  skepticism  of  the 
human  mind,  which  is  the  natural  substratum  of  super- 
stition in  all  lands.  Christian  and  heathen  alike,  acquires, 
from  its  growing  acquaintance  with  Christian  philosophy, 
literature,  and  life,  an  aggressive  energy  and  a  power  of 
expression  which  are  often  startling.  And  the  missionary 
to  the  peoples  of  the  older  civilizations  faces  problems 
to-day  which  his  predecessors  never  encountered  ;  he  con- 
sequently requires  a  wider  knowledge  of  heathen  philoso- 
phy, beliefs,  and  literature,  and  a  nobler  faith  and  courage  to 
meet  his  difficulties,  than  have  heretofore  been  considered 
essential. 

Realizing  the  necessity  of  familiarizing  the  heathen  mind 
in  its  earlier  more  impressionable  and  more  plastic  stages 
with  Christian  doctrines,  ideals,  and  habits  of  thought,  most 
Protestant  missions  early  instituted  schools  and  emphasized 


196  Ecce  Clerus 

the  important  work  of  education.  The  result,  notably  in  old 
civilizations  like  India,  China,  Japan,  has  been  the  develop- 
ment of  a  faculty  of  independent  and  discriminating  criticism 
not  always  favorable  to  the  claims  of  the  Christian  religion. 
Thousands  of  high-caste  Hindu  youths,  for  example,  have 
been  weaned  from  their  ancestral  faith — discredited  alike 
by  the  light  and  science  of  the  West  and  the  teachings  of 
the  Christian  Church — but  they  have  not  transferred  their 
attachment  to  Christianity,  Deplorable  and  discouraging 
as  this  is,  the  wiser  course  is  not  to  indulge  in  lamenta- 
tions over  it,  but  to  find  out  how  it  comes  to  pass  and 
consider  carefully  what  its  precise  significance  is. 

It  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  neither  in  India  nor  else- 
where does  the  cultivated  intellect  wake  up  from  its  slum- 
bers as  a  child  which  one  may  lead  by  the  hand  just  where 
one  pleases,  but  as  a  factor  to  be  fairly  reckoned  with  in 
the  ever-widening  world  of  thought.  Like  a  colt  which  has 
long  been  tied  up  and  has  broken  loose,  it  is  in  no  hurry  to 
commit  itself  to  any  new  suitor  for  its  faith  and  loyalty. 
It  prefers  to  look  around  with  care  and  discrimination  and 
see  just  what  the  new  situation  is.  It  ought  not  to  astonish 
us  if  at  times  it  asks  awkward  and  even  startling  questions, 
such  as  his  Zulu  collaborator  asked  Bishop  Colenso  about 
the  dimensions  of  the  ark,  giving  birth  to  a  controversy 
whose  deathless  and  ever-widening  echoes  are  heard  even  in 
our  own  day — questions  we  would  never  ask  ourselves,  per- 
haps, without  suggestion  from  the  doubter,  but  which  yet  it 
were  well  for  us  to  be  prepared  to  answer. 

It  is  not  surprising  that  the  educated  devotee  of  Brahman- 
ism,  or  Buddhism,  or  Confucianism,  or  Taoism  should  be 
as  anxious  to  obtain  a  critical  knowledge  of  the  philosophy, 
religion,  and  moral  condition  of  Christendom  as  the  mis- 
sionary and  the  student  of  comparative  religion  is  to  know 
the  character  and  contents  of  the  Rig-veda  or  the  Laws  of 
Manu  o(  the  Brahmans,  or  the  three  Pitakas  of  the  Buddhist, 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         197 

or  the  Shi  King  of  Kong-fu-tse;  and  the  sins  and  errors  of 
the  peoples  who  respectively  accept  these  scriptures  as  their 
rule  of  life.  Christianity  is  destined  to  be  known  in  the 
life  and  manners  as  well  as  in  the  beliefs  and  teachings  of 
its  adherents,  by  the  intelligent  heathen  as  fully  and  ac- 
curately as  the  missionary  and  the  friends  of  missions  are 
anxious  to  know  him  in  his  creed  and  in  his  moral  and  reli- 
gious condition ;  and  unless  for  this  searching  scrutiny  which 
is  coming  we  are  much  better  prepared  than  we  are  now,  it  is 
obvious  that  as  soon  as  the  actual  condition  of  modern 
Christian  civilization  is  known  the  missionary,  as  its  repre- 
sentative among  educated  heathen,  will  be  more  and  more 
exposed  to  the  stinging  retort  of  which  even  the  perfect 
One  admitted  the  general  force,  but  did  not  feel  the  spe- 
cific application,  "  Physician  heal  thyself."  '*  If  Christ  can 
save  men  from  the  power  of  sin,  your  religion  must  be 
divine,"  said  some  Brahman  officials  of  the  government  in 
the  Punjab  to  a  Wesleyan  missionary*  who  had  lectured 
to  them  weekly  on  the  gospel  of  St.  John  at  their  own 
request,  **  but  where  are  the  people  saved  from  sin  by  this 
Christ  ?  There  may  be  one  or  two  saved,  but  what  about 
the  thousands  around  here  [English  residents — soldiers  and 
civilians]  that  are  evil  and  vicious  ? "  "  You  complain  that 
you  do  not  make  converts  among  us,"  said  Dharmapala,  the 
eloquent  and  scholarly  Buddhist  priest  at  the  Parliament  of 
Religions  in  Chicago.  **  You  preach  a  God  of  love,  but  in 
your  actions  you  are  selfish.  You  make  of  an  ignorant  or 
an  unsophisticated  man  a  perfect  hypocrite.  You  have 
used  the  story  of  a  life-crushing  bloody  Juggernaut  to  secure 
the  means  to  save  alleged  heathens.  Juggernaut  has  been 
popularized  by  Christian  missionaries,  and  yet  a  commission 
composed  of  eminent  Englishmen  has  declared  that  the 
Christian  idea  of  Juggernaut  was  a  myth,  that  death  and 

♦  Rev.  J.  H.   Bateson's  speech  at  Wesleyan   Missionary  Anniversary,  London, 
May,  1896. 


198  Ecce  Clems 

blood  were  repulsive  to  our  people.    This  Christian  story 
has  been  exploded.     It  has  gone  into  oblivion."* 

In  some  such  strain  of  dignified  resentment,  on  the  one 
hand,  or  of  close  judicial  cross-questioning,  on  the  other,  is 
intellectually  awakened  India  destined  to  test  the  hitherto 
unquestioned  claims  of  the  Christian  religion.  Nor  ought 
any  missionary  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  race  to  complain  of 
this.  For  in  this  very  mood  of  reserve  and  cautious  thought- 
fulness  his  ancestors  received  the  message  of  the  Roman 
missionaries  in  the  far-back  dawn  of  English  civilization. 
Having  received  the  apostle  of  the  Church  and  his  com- 
panions, observes  the  historian  Green,  "  sitting  in  the  open 
air  on  the  chalk-down  above  Minster,  where  the  eye  nowa- 
days catches  miles  away  over  the  marshes  the  dim  tower  of 
Canterbury,"  King  ^thelbert,  in  597,  listened  patiently  to  the 
long  sermon  of  Augustine  as  the  interpreters  the  abbot  had 
brought  with  him  from  Gaul  rendered  it  in  the  English 
tongue.  "Your  words  are  fair,"  he  said,  "but  they  are  new 
and  of  a  doubtful  meaning."f  And  time  was  asked  to  con- 
sider them.  Does  anyone,  looking  back  over  the  history 
of  Anglo-Saxon  Christianity  for  more  than  a  thousand 
years,  regret  such  slow  deliberation  and  counting  of  the 
cost? 

3.  Present  Outlook. 

It  is  perfectly  clear  that  the  Christian  Church  as  she  looks 
across  the  threshhold  of  the  twentieth  century  will  be  re- 
quired in  her  missionary  policy  and  operations  to  grapple 
with  a  situation  almost  entirely  new  and  growing  more  and 
more  difficult  every  day. 

I.  In  the  first  place,  from  the  new  point  of  elevation  on 
which  his  training  under  Christian  auspices,  and  his  more 
or  less  intimate  acquaintance  with  the  life  and  literature  of 


*  Address  in  Chicago,  1893. 
t  J.  Richard  Green  s  History 


of  England^  vol.  i,  p.  41. 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         199 

Christendom  have  placed  him,  the  enlightened  devotee  of 
paganism  perceives  his  advantage,  and  uses  it  without 
scruple.  Not  only  is  he  unprepared  to  sever  himself  from 
the  past,  disavow  the  traditions  of  his  family,  tribe,  and  caste, 
and  proclaim  himself  a  foreigner  among  his  own  people,  by 
embracing  a  foreign  faith,  but  he  boldly  assumes  the  role  of 
reformer  and  apologist  at  once.  He  insists  on  reading  a 
new  and  nobler  meaning  into  the  philosophy  and  religious 
literature,  customs,  and  institutions  of  his  people,  and 
aggressively  compares  the  religion  of  his  ancestors — the 
growth  of  his  native  soil — in  the  new  guise  he  thus  gives  it, 
with  its  less  venerable  rival,  coming  from  afar,  greatly  to  the 
disappointment  and  disadvantage  of  the  latter.  In  this 
work  of  rehabilitation  and  defense  he  finds  himself  cordially 
commended  and  assisted  by  many  representative  scholars  of 
Europe  and  America,  who  have  not  only  studied  with 
sympathy  and  insight  the  sacred  literatures  of  the  great 
religions  of  the  East,  translated  them  into  good  idiomatic 
English,  and  in  this  way  placed  them  in  the  hands  of 
Western  readers,  but  commented,  in  transports  of  en- 
thusiasm and  delight,  on  sentences  of  rare  "  moral  beauty  " 
found  scattered  over  their  voluminous  pages  like  green 
oases  here  and  there,  relieving  the  dreary  yellow  acres  of  the 
desert. 

In  his  recently  published  lectures  on  the  Vedanta  phi- 
losophy the  distinguished  Sanskrit  scholar  Max  Miiller  in- 
vites an  attentive  hearing  for  the  profounder  thoughts  of 
Indian  thinkers  about  the  soul  and  God,  and  reminds  us 
that,  if  it  seem  strange  that  sages  whose  names  were  long 
ago  consigned  to  the  limbo  of  forgetfulness  should  have 
known  more  about  the  soul  than  the  philosophers  of  Greece, 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  or  even  of  modern  times,  we  must 
remember  that  "the  observatories  of  the  soul  have  remained 
much  the  same,"  and  that  the  repose  and  quiet  which  are 
requisite  for  accurate  observation  of  the  movements  of  the 


200  Ecce  Clerus 

human  spirit  "were  more  easily  found  in  the  silent  forests 
of  India  than  in  the  noisy  streets  of  your  so-called  centers 
of  civilization." 

2.  Side  by  side  with  these  efforts  to  recast  the  native  cult 
in  the  terms  of  modern  thought  and  philosophy  a  policy  of 
imitation  is  sometimes  adopted,  and  where  rivalry  by  reform 
is  out  of  the  question,  and  academic  and  argumentative 
opposition  would  be  powerless,  and  persecution  would  be 
impracticable  or  of  no  avail,  the  sarcasm  of  counterfeiture 
has  proved  a  marked  success.  In  a  curious  manner  the 
truth  is  being  afresh  brought  home  to  the  conviction  of  the 
thoughtful  missionary,  that  if  he  trusts  to  the  mere  accidents 
and  externalism  of  his  religion — its  rites,  ceremonies,  institu- 
tions, dignities,  titles,  terminology,  and  usages,  or  even  to  its 
superior  rational  and  ethical  elements — to  recommend  it  and 
secure  its  triumph,  he  is  building  hope  upon  the  sand.  For 
in  none  of  these  respects  is  Christianity  beyond  more  or 
less  successful  copying.  The  revival  of  Buddhism  in  Ceylon, 
for  example,  where  twice  over,  during  the  last  three  and 
a  half  centuries,  Christianity  seemed  to  have  nearly  ex- 
tinguished the  native  cult,*  is  solely  owing  to  the  discovery 
of  the  fact  that  all  the  distinguishing  external  features  of 
the  Christian  Church  may  be  appropriated  and  paraded 
with  immense  popular  advantage  without  the  trouble  on  the 
part  of  the  imitating  cult  of  an  inward  transformation. 
Within  the  last  few  years  the  Buddhists  of  Ceylon  have 
begun  to  keep  the  anniversary  of  Buddha's  birth,  just  as 
Christians  have  celebrated  annually  for  nearly  nineteen  cen- 

*  Three  and  a  half  centuries  ago  the  Portuguese  foiind  Ceylon  a  Buddhist  land. 
They  compelled  the  people  to  become  Christian,  pandering  to  their  oriental  vanity  by 
giving  them  high-sounding  baptismal  names,  and  by  interfering  slightly,  if  at  all,  with 
idolatrous  ceremonies.  A  century  after  the  Dutch  pursued  a  similar  policy,  and  multi- 
tudes who  had  been  Roman  Catholic  Buddhist  Christians  became  Protestant  Buddhist 
Christians.  A  profession  of  faith,  with  baptism,  was  demanded  from  any  person  seek- 
ing government  employment  even  in  the  humblest  capacity.  As  a  consequence  Chris- 
tianity became  duplex,  degenerate,  without  saving  salt.  Less  than  a  century  ago,  when 
Britain  took  the  country,  eighty  per  cent  of  the  people  were  Christians,  but  in  ten  years 
the  temples  liad  increased  sixfold,  and  half  of  the  Christians  had  gone  back  to  Bud- 
dhism.— Speech  of  Rev.  T.  Mosscrop,  in  Exeter  Hall,  London,  1894.  See  also  Cople- 
ston's  Buddhism. 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         201 

tunes  the  advent  of  Christ.  Carols  are  sung  in  the  early 
morning  hours,  including  a  version  of  the  well-known  Christ- 
mas hymn,  "Christians  [Buddhists],  awake,  salute  the  happy 
morn."  Lanterns  and  other  transparent  devices  are  borne 
through  the  streets  of  Kandy  and  Colombo  displaying  the 
audacious  parody,  "Glory  to  Buddha  in  the  highest,  on  earth 
peace  and  good  will  toward  men."  Christians  are  scornfully 
alluded  to  as  "  the  heathen  of  the  land,"  and  the  theosophic 
Buddhist  priests  are  styled  Rev.  Dharmapala,  Rev.  Buddha- 
gosha,  etc.  They  have  established  week-day  and  Sunday 
schools,  published  catechisms  full  of  ideas  and  forms  of 
expression  stolen  barefacedly  from  Christian  catechetical 
manuals,  and  in  some  instances  have  copied  that  peculiarly 
Methodist  institution,  the  class  meeting.  If  this  policy  of 
mimicry  is  at  times  grotesque  or  even  malicious,  it  is,  never- 
theless, tactful,  adroit,  alert,  aggressive.  And  now  Chris- 
tianity in  heathen  lands  finds  satire  and  ridicule  harder  to 
face  than  were  the  lions  of  the  Roman  arena,  the  tortures  of 
the  rack,  or  the  fires  of  martyrdom  to  the  Christians  of  yore  ; 
for  as  Gibbon,  himself  a  past  master  in  the  sardonical  art, 
triumphantly  asks,  "  Who  can  answer  a  sneer  ?" 

3.  Only  rarely  and  as  a  last  resort  does  the  pagan  protege 
of  evangelical  philanthropy  resent  the  unsolicited  interest 
taken  in  his  welfare  and  become  a  persecutor.  Of  late 
years  the  Chinese  and  the  Turks  are  the  only  people  who 
have  continued  to  employ  brutality  and  violence  in  oppos- 
ing Christian  missions,  and  the  incentive  to  this  policy  of 
outrage  and  murder,  which  is  directed  by  the  governing 
classes  of  both  nations,  alike  against  missionaries  of  all  de- 
nominations, is  said  to  be  not  patriotism  nor  excess  of  zeal 
for  their  native  cults,  but  dread  of  the  civilizing  forces 
which  the  life  and  labors  of  the  missionaries  everywhere  set 
in  play.  "  The  influence  of  Western  civilization,"  says  Mr. 
Valentine  Chirol,  who  was  at  Peking  as  correspondent  of 
the  London  Times  during  the  recent  war  between  China  and 


202  Ecce  Clerus 

Japan,  "  in  whatever  shape  it  manifests  itself,  is  an  abom- 
ination in  the  eyes  of  the  rulers  of  China,  whose  days  would 
be  counted  were  it  ever  to  persecute  the  masses.  The 
hatred  directed  against  the  missionaries  is  only  a  peculiarly 
virulent  form  of  hatred  directed  against  Europeans  gen- 
erally, and  it  is  easy  to  understand  why  it  should  be  a  pecul- 
iarly virulent  one.  Missionary  work  is  practically  the  only 
agency  through  which  the  influence  of  Western  civilization 
can  at  present  reach  the  masses.  .  .  .  The  missionary  alone 
goes  out  into  the  byways  as  well  as  the  highways,  and, 
whether  he  resides  in  a  treaty  port  or  in  some  remote  prov- 
ince, strives  to  live  with  and  among  and  for  the  people. 
The  life  which  he  lives,  whether  it  be  the  ascetic  life  of  the 
Roman  Catholic  missionary  or  the  family  life  of  a  Protestant 
missionary,  with  wife  and  children,  is  in  itself  a  standing 
reproach  to  the  life  of  gross  self-indulgence  led  by  the 
average  mandarin.  But  in  the  eyes  of  the  latter  it  becomes 
a  public  scandal  when,  in  glaring  contrast  to  every  vice  of 
native  rule,  the  foreign  missionary  in  his  daily  dealings 
with  the  people  of  his  district  conveys  a  continuous  ob- 
ject lesson  of  justice  and  kindness,  of  unselfishness  and 
integrity."  * 

The  same  explanation  holds,  in  a  large  degree,  of  the 
genesis  and  motive  of  the  Turkish  barbarities  in  Armenia, 
whose  harrowing  reports  have  operated  like  successive  fits 
of  nightmare  on  the  paralyzed  and  impotent  sympathy  of 
Christendom.  It  is  not  so  much  zeal  for  Islam  that  makes 
the  ruthless  sword  of  the  "  unspeakable  Turk  "  leap  from  its 
scabbard  on  the  slightest  pretext  or  provocation  as  it  is  the 
dread  that  the  standard  of  fair  dealing,  justice,  and  hu- 
manity quietly  set  up  and  steadily  maintained  by  the  lives 
and  teachings  of  the  missionaries  will  be  a  standing  reproach 
to  official  corruption,  rapacity,  and  lawlessness,  and  generate 

*  The  Far  Eastern   Question^  chap.,    "The  Genesis  of  Missionary  Outrage  in 
China,"  p.  78. 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         203 

a  sense  of  wrong  and  resentment  in  the  breasts  of  the  op- 
pressed. 

4.  Policy  of  Success. 

Now,  taking  a  broad  survey  of  the  heathen  field  to-day, 
a  pohcy  adequate  to  the  situation  requires  : 

I.  A  careful  study  of  ethnic  systems  and  the  relation  of 
Christianity  to  them  as  they  live  in  the  thought,  worship, 
and  literature  of  modern  heathendom.  To  these  systems 
Christianity,  with  its  high  claim  to  universal  dominion,  owes 
something  more  than  an  attitude  of  uncompromising  antag- 
onism and  a  duty  of  wholesale  denunciation.  It  is  impos- 
sible now  to  take  for  granted  that  heathen  morals  are  un- 
mitigatedly  corrupt,  and  heathen  religions  systems  of 
unmingled  fraud  and  falsehood,  to  be  condemned  and  re- 
jected in  the  lump.  Men  who  have  stood  face  to  face  with 
them  for  years,  and  have  studied  them  in  their  genesis  and 
slow  development  in  history;  in  the  different  phases  through 
which  they  have  passed  ;  in  their  literature,  institutions, 
present  status,  character,  and  teachings,  have  set  the  ex- 
ample of  a  very  different  strain.  No  doubt  a  desperate  and 
often  unreasonable  antipathy  to  Christianity  inspires  most 
of  the  extravagant  and  vague  eulogies  bestowed  on  heathen 
ethics  and  religion,  but  that  ought  to  make  the  judicious 
advocate  of  Christianity  not  less  but  more  anxious  to  be 
fair  and  equitable.  The  hoary  and  venerable  errors  in- 
woven in  ethnic  religion  and  philosophy  are  all  the  more 
effectively  exposed  when  there  is  quick  and  cordial  recogni- 
tion of  the  few  strands  of  truth  they  contain.  And,  even  if 
our  duty  required  of  us  an  absolute  and  unqualified  con- 
demnation, the  difficult  task  of  weaning  the  heathen  mind 
from  systems  under  which  it  has  been  molded,  and  by 
whose  idioms  of  thought  and  conception  its  very  texture 
has  been  saturated  and  colored  for  centuries,  would  seem 
to  suggest  the  need  of  an  intelligent  and  sympathetic  in- 


204  Ecce  Clems 

sight  and  of  discrimination,  delicacy,  and  fairness  in  our 
method  of  treating  them  rather  than  a  spirit  of  supercilious 
pity,  impatience,  or  contempt. 

Speaking  of  Buddhism,  for  example,  in  whose  teachings 
countless  millions  of  mankind  have  sought  consolation  and 
guidance  in  life  and  final  escape  from  the  interminable 
chain  of  births  and  deaths  and  strange  transmigratory  ex- 
periences in  which  human  existence  is  believed  by  it  to  be 
held,  the  Bishop  of  Colombo  says  :  "  The  important  litera- 
ture in  which  this  system  is  embodied,  its  earnest  moral 
tone  and  the  immense  numbers  of  those  who  have  professed 
it  give  it  a  strong  claim  on  men's  attention."  *  He  points 
out  that  before  Islam  arose  and  when  Greeks  and  Romans, 
Jews  and  Christians,  were  few  in  numbers  it  was  the  religion 
of  the  majority  of  mankind  ;  that  "  more  men  have  owned 
the  Buddha  than  have  owned  as  yet  any  other  teacher," 
and  he  remarks,  "The  spectacle  of  human  multitudes  is 
still  an  impressive  and  moving  spectacle,  often  a  pathetic 
one."  Nor  is  it  conceivable  that  these  millions  of  human 
beings  have  submitted  to  the  yoke  of  Buddhism  and  sought 
to  follow  its  holy  eightfold  path  of  right  belief,  right  aim, 
right  speech,  right-conduct,  right  livelihood,  right  endeavor, 
right  recollectedness,  and  full-souled  meditation,  whose  goal  is 
the  external  calm  of  annihilation,  without  some  measure  of 
moral  elevation  and  inward  spiritual  repose,  f  "  Happy  is 
the  solitude  of  him  who  is  full  of  joy,  who  has  learnt  the 
truth,  who  sees  (the  truth),  Happy  is  the  freedom  from 
malice  in  this  world,  self-restraint  toward  all  things  that 
have  life.  Happy  is  freedom  from  lust  in  this  world,  get- 
ting beyond  all  desires  and  the  putting  away  of  that  pride 
which  comes  from  the  thought,  'I  am.'  This  truly  is  the 
highest  happiness.  "J  Such  are  the  words  which  the  Vinaya 
Pitaka  ascribes  to  the  sage  of  the  forest.     "  Gazing  forth 

♦  Buddhism,  Primitive   and  Present,  by    the   Right    Rev.  Reginald   S.  Cople- 
ston,  D.D.,  p.  I.  t  Ibid.,  p.  43.  %  Ibid.,  p.  38. 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         205 

like  the  Sage  of  Lucretius  from  the  serene  heights  of  wis- 
dom over  the  varied  world  of  life,  but  radiating  forth,  unlike 
the  sage,  rays  of  kind  feeling  and  love  in  every  direction  ; 
calm  amid  storms,  because  withdrawn  into  a  trance  of 
dreamless  unconsciousness;  undisturbed,  because  allowing 
no  external  object  to  gain  any  hold  on  sense  or  emotion, 
or  even  thought;  owing  nothing  and  wanting  nothing;  reso- 
lute, fearless,  firm  as  a  pillar;  in  utter  isolation  from  all 
other  beings,  except  by  feeling  kindly  to  them  all;  such  is 
the  ideal  *  conqueror  '  of  Buddhism.  The  last  point  of 
vantage  by  which  existence  could  lay  hold  of  him  is  gone  ; 
he  cannot  continue  to  exist,"*  Neither  the  man  who  con- 
ceived this  noble  ideal  nor  the  people  who  have  respected 
it  for  so  many  centuries  can  justly  be  considered  "men 
hopelessly  benighted,"  either  morally  or  intellectually.  As 
the  learned  author  of  Buddhism,  Primitive  and  Present^ 
justly  remarks  :  *'  No  one  can  claim  for  either  Old  or  New 
Testament  the  exclusive  communication  to  man  of  the 
theory  of  disinterested  kindness  and  the  law  of  love.  The 
same  Holy  Spirit  who  wrote  our  Scriptures  ^diz'^  to  some  of 
the  Buddhist  teachers  no  despicable  measure  of  insight  into  these 
truths." 

2.  But  though  we  do  not  allow  ourselves  to  lose  sight  of  the 
redeeming  features  of  heathen  cults,  it  is  nevertheless  neces- 
sary to  look  at  them  steadily  and  impartially,  not  as  they  ap- 
pear in  the  occasional  glimpses  of  truth  and  flashes  of  fine 
moral  sentiment  to  be  found  on  the  pages  of  their  sacred 
books,  nor  yet  as  rehabilitated  by  the  philosophic  and  poetic 
genius  of  their  most  enlightened  native  and  most  enamored 
European  apologists  and  exponents,  in  their  well-meant 
efforts  to  eliminate  their  uglier  features  or  hide  them  from 
criticism.  We  must  contemplate  them  in  their  everyday 
and  stay-at-home  aspect  and  attire,  and  in  their  practical 
tendencies  and  actual  effects  on  the   lives  and  morals  of 

♦  Buddhism^  Primitive  and  Present^  p.  99. 


206  Ecce  Clerus 

their  votaries.  The  visitor  to  the  shrines  of  Hindu  gods  in 
the  various  temples  of  the  holy  city  Benares  and  of  other 
cities  in  India  may  or  may  not  feel  an  unconquerable  sen- 
sation of  moral  disgust  as  he  looks  upon  the  spectacles  of 
filth,  obscenity,  and  shame  that  everwhere  meet  his  eyes.  He 
may  or  may  not  see  "in  popular  Hinduism  the  worship  of  the 
incarnation  of  the  worst  vices  of  mankind."  He  may  or  not 
deplore  the  repulsively  suggestive  carvings  which  adorn  the 
idol  cars  in  the  public  streets  and  thoroughfares,  the  hideous 
symbols  of  passion  worshiped  in  every  Sivite  temple,  or  the 
band  of  Nautch  girls  attached  thereto  for  purposes  unmen- 
tionably  vile.  All  this  and  much  more  may  or  may  not 
seem  to  him  to  be  more  than  a  mere  difference  of  national 
taste.  But  when  the  traveler  in  India  pauses  to  contem- 
plate the  effect  of  caste  on  Hindu  society  as  a  whole,  the 
insuperable  stumbling-block  it  offers  to  the  intellectual, 
moral,  and  social  improvement  of  the  people,  the  millstone- 
like pressure  with  which  it  weighs  upon,  crushes,  and  grinds  . 
the  inferior  classes  ;  when  he  considers  the  position  of 
isolation  and  ignorance  and  often  of  hopeless  infamy  to 
which  it  consigns  womanhood  from  the  earliest  years  of 
infancy  to  mature  age — when  he  finds  her  branded  with 
diabolic  levity  as  "a  necessary  evil,"  lampooned  in  reputable 
literature  as  "faithless,  dangerous,  impure; "when  he  thinks 
of  twenty  millions  of  Hindu  widows — many  of  them  mere 
children — subject  to  "  degradation  of  all  kinds,"  and  made 
"the  instruments  of  hateful  impurity,"  as  Pundita  Ramabai 
Sarasvati  has  shown  in  her  book.  The  High  Caste  Hindu 
Woman — when  he  looks  steadily  at  these  facts  he  finds 
it  difficult  to  deny  the  breadth  and  power  of  the  curse  with 
which  Hinduism  burdens  and  oppresses  human  life.* 

Of  Buddhism,  though  at  first  a  revolt  against  Brahmanism 
and  undoubtedly  in  its  earlier  stages  an  evangel  of  peace, 

♦  "  No  wonder,"  said  Mr.  B.  B.  Najarkar  in  an  address  at  the  Parliament  of  Religions, 
in  Chicago, "  poor,  forlorn,  and  persecuted  widows  often  drown  themselves  in  an  adjacent 
pool  or  well,  or  make  a  quietus  of  their  lives  by  draining  the  poison  cup." 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         207 

kindness,  unselfishness,  and  good  will,  a  not  much  higher 
estimate  can  be  formed  as  it  anywhere  exists  to-day.  In- 
deed, it  is  inconceivable  to  the  Western  mind  that  its 
fundamental  doctrine — the  weary  interminableness  of  trans- 
migration— can  at  any  time  have  been  other  than  the  weight 
of  a  perpetual  nigiitmare  on  the  energies  of  the  human 
spirit.  "  The  view  of  the  soul  underlying  this  idea  is  that 
there  is  no  permanent  independent  soul  existing  in  or  with 
the  body,  and  migrating  from  one  body  to  another.  The 
self  or  personality  has  no  permanent  reality  ;  it  is  the  result 
of  a  combination  of  faculties  and  characters.  No  one  of 
these  elements  is  a  person  or  soul  or  self.  Death  is  the 
breaking  up  of  this  combination.  But  there  is  a  force  by 
which  these  elements  on  which  life  depends  tend  to  recombine 
{karma),  a  fatal  attraction  {upadana)  by  which  these  ele- 
ments of  life  cling  together  and  recombine.  So  this  force 
{karma)  remains  a  kind  of  desire  for  new  life  and  animates 
with  desire  to  recombine  those  severed  elements  of  life. 
This  recombination  may  become  a  man,  a  demon,  a  deity, 
or  a  dog." 

The  tears  a  man  has  shed  over  his  fathers  amount  to 
more  water  than  all  the  oceans.  Everyone  has  been  every- 
one's father,  mother,  son,  etc.  The  blood  certain  ascetics 
shed  when  slaughtered  as  oxen,  goats,  birds,  dogs,  exceeds 
all  the  waters  of  all  the  seas.  The  bones  of  one  individual 
in  the  course  of  an  age  {kalpd)  make  a  great  mountain.  A 
kalpa  is  so  long  that  if  a  solid  mountain  were  lightly 
brushed  with  a  silk  handkerchief  once  in  a  thousand  years, 
it  would  be  worn  away  long  before  a  single  kalpa  was 
exhausted.  Yet  the  beings  born  again  as  men  are  only  as  a 
nailful  of  dust  to  the  whole  earth."  What  is  there  in  such 
teaching  to  illumine  life,  to  elevate  sentiment,  or  inspire 
men  with  hope  and  high  moral  aims  ? 

"I  have  climbed,"  says  the  Rev.  T.  Mosscrop,  Wesleyan 
missionary  in  Ceylon,  "  through  the  chilly  night  up  the  steeps 


208  Ecce  Clems 

of  Adam's  Peak  to  the  sacred  footprint,  seventy-five  hundred 

feet  above  the  sea,  and  as  the   first  rays  of  the  sun  have 

come  over  the  eastern   hills  I   have  heard   the  great  bell 

toll  and   seen   the  people  gather  for   service,  such  as   is 

repeated  continually  in  the  Buddhist   temples   throughout 

the  land.     The  priest  begins  to  chant  the  Three  Refuges  of 

Buddhism : 

Buddham  saranan  gachchami, 
Dharman  saranan  gachchami, 
Sangham  saranan  gachchami. 

I  take  refuge  in  Buddha, 
I  take  refuge  in  the  Law, 
I  take  refuge  in  the  Priesthood. 

And  you  hear  the  thin  piping  of  the  little  child,  the  shrill 
treble  of  the  Singhalese  woman,  the  deep  bass  of  the  strong 
man  in  his  prime,  and  the  husky  tremor  of  the  old  man 
nearing  death  blend  in  these  promises  of  refuge.  And  we 
are  particularly  anxious  to  know  what  it  is  to  take  refuge 
not  in  the  law  or  the  priesthoood,  but  in  the  Supreme  Per- 
son, and  we  find  that  Buddha  has  passed  into  Nirvana,  the 
state  and  place  of  passionless  bliss  and  eternal  calm  ;  that 
he  can  hear  no  prayer,  and  send  down  no  help.  And  we 
are  reminded  of  the  colossal  images  of  Buddha  found 
throughout  the  land,  near  to  the  ways  and  woes  of  men,  the 
face  impassive  with  dreamless  sleep,  the  ear  heavy  that  it 
cannot  hear,  the  arm  shortened  into  the  lap,  indicative  of 
meditation — shortened  that  it  cannot  save  ;  and  the  Chris- 
tian heart  recoiling  from  the  illusive  hopes  of  Buddhism, 
centers  itself  once  again  on  the  living,  the  reigning  Christ, 

and  sings : 

Other  refuge  have  I  none, 
Hangs  my  helpless  soul  on  Thee. 

And  tested  thus,  the  witchery,  the  glamour  of  popular, 
philosophic,  poetic  Buddhism  go,  for  it  is  found  wanting 
in  the  simplest  elements  of  the  Christian  hope.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  Buddhism  does  not  satisfy  the  people,  for 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century        209 

the  bed  rock  on  which  they  rest  in  hfe's  crisis  hours  is 
demonism." 

3.  Another  consideration  to  which  a  true  missionary  policy 
and  an  adequate  preparation  for  missionary  work  must  have 
regard  is  the  material  to  be  handled.  This,  of  course,  dif- 
fers widely  among  different  races.  And  the  circumstances 
affecting  the  diversity,  many  and  varied  as  they  are,  are  all  of 
them  worthy  of  careful  study,  such  as  race,  religion,  historical 
antecedents,  present  political  conditions,  degree  of  civiliza- 
tion reached,  extent  and  character  of  previous  acquaintance 
with  Christianity.  In  the  nature  of  things  the  work  of  Cal- 
vert, Hunt,  and  others  in  Fiji,  of  Williams  in  Erromanga,  of 
Paton  in  the  New  Hebrides,  of  Gilmore  among  the  Mon- 
gols, of  Moffat  and  Livingstone,  of  Bishops  Hannington 
and  Taylor  among  the  semisavage  tribes  of  Bechuanaland 
and  of  Eastern,  Western,  and  Central  Africa,  required  very 
different  methods  from  those  of  the  missionary  who  under- 
takes to  evangelize  the  Japanese  or  the  Chinaman,  or  turn 
the  philosophic  Hindu  from  his  idols  and  his  sensuous  wor- 
ship of  four  thousand  years  to  serve  the  living  God. 

The  missionary  of  to-day  in  Ceylon  finds  the  Buddhist  of 
that  island  under  alert  and  able  leadership.  And  with  the 
wariness  and  caution  taught  by  the  past  reverses  of  his  cult 
and  a  sense  of  equality  if  not  of  superiority  to  any  rival 
faith,  born  of  its  present  triumph,  he  is  much  less  susceptible 
to  Christian  argument  and  appeal  than  he  was  twenty  years 
ago,  before  the  present  remarkable  resurgence  of  Singhalese 
heathenism  began.  On  the  other  hand,  while  diplomacy  has 
secured  for  the  missionary  in  China  a  protection  from  offi- 
cial interference  and  a  freedom  of  access  to  the  people  he 
never  enjoyed  before,  it  has  seemed  only  to  intensify  the 
antipathy  and  hate  of  the  educated,  the  wealthy,  and  the 
ruling  classes,  and  made  them  more  difficult  of  approach. 

In  India  the  presence  of  Mohammedanism,  with  its  un- 
savory past  record,  its  poHtical  ambitions,  treasonable  temper, 
14 


210  Ecce  Clerus 

and  love  of  rule,  its  lofty  pride,  fierce  fanaticism,  and  sullen 
distrust  of  everything  not  Mohammedan,  makes  Hindus  the 
more  ready  to  listen  with  respect  to  Christian  teaching. 
And  yet  here,  where  caste  is  supreme,  pronounced,  all-per- 
vasive, inveterate,  the  problem  which  confronts  the  mission- 
ary is  the  most  complex  and  difficult  to  be  met  with  any- 
where. The  three  classes  which  invite  his  attention  and 
labors  offer  about  an  equal  amount  of  difficulty  and  discour- 
agement to  his  undertaking.  There  is  the  upper  stratum  of 
native  society — the  educated  high-caste  Hindu  numbering 
perhaps  a  million  and  a  half.  He  accepts  the  advantage  of 
a  good  secular  and  religious  training  offered  him  in  the  vari- 
ous missionary  schools  and  colleges,  but  rarely — practically 
never — thinks  it  worth  his  while  to  forego  the  pride  and 
privileges  of  caste  for  the  hopes  and  honors  of  Christian 
discipleship.  There  is  the  pariah  class,  numbering  perhaps 
seventy  millions — an  outcast  and  degraded  people.  Ad- 
dicted mostly  to  devil  worship,  they  are  miserably  ignorant 
and  pitiably  poor,  sharing  nothing  without  stint,  except  per- 
haps the  contempt  of  the  classes  above  them.  These  are 
an  easy  prey  to  missionary  influence  and  appeal,  but  their 
moral  worth  when  secured  is  not  great,  and  the  motives  of 
their  attachment  are  not  always  above  suspicion.  There  is 
the  average-caste  Hindu,  numbering  between  one  hun- 
dred and  eighty  and  one  hundred  and  ninety  millions.  He 
is  typically  not  a  townsman,  fond  of  activity  and  excite- 
ment, but  a  villager,  loving  quiet  and  repose,  with  a  strain 
of  the  recluse  in  his  temperament — a  man  of  monoto- 
nous mood,  of  sluggish  intellectual  movement,  of  imper- 
turbable temper.  His  motto  is  festina  lente.  He  dislikes 
hurry,  abbreviated  processes,  and  precipitancy.  He  loves 
to  approach  his  subject  by  a  flank  movement  or  by  a  cir- 
cuitous route  from  the  rear.  He  is  a  pantheist,  but  ex- 
presses his  faith  not  in  the  language  of  metaphysics,  but  in 
the  vaguer  speech  of  poetry.     "  God,"  he  says,  "is  in  every- 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Centurj  211 

thing — in  me,  in  the  tiger,  in  the  cow,  in  the  crocodile." 
He  is  a  philosopher,  or  the  product  of  a  philosophy  ;  he  is  a 
fatalist,  a  stoic.  He  takes  no  note  of  time  except  as  his  past 
misfortunes  remind  him  that  there  have  been  times  in  his 
life  when  he  must  have  been  trying  to  cut  the  threads  of 
fate  and  dodge  the  decrees  of  destiny.  He  is  a  deeply  reli- 
gious man,  "  a  convinced  devotee  "  of  his  ancestral  gods. 
"  He  revels  in  myths  and  regulates  his  life  by  omens."  His 
notable  experiences  are  sorrows,  not  joys.  His  red-letter 
dates  are  days  of  disaster.  With  him  life,  thought,  speech, 
action,  have  no  decisive  moral  complexion  except  that  given 
them  by  their  obvious  external  consequences.  There  is 
no  sin  in  actions  and  purposes  that  succeed.  There  is  no 
virtue  in  what  miscarries  and  breaks  down,  no  matter  what 
its  motive.  A  lie  is  not  a  lamentable  thing  if  it  is  believed 
and  is  clever  enough  to  escape  detection  and  exposure. 
Truth  is  a  crime  if  undiplomatically  spoken  and  inexpedi- 
ently maintained.  He  is  a  believer  in  transmigration,  and  is 
convinced  that  there  is  no  escape  from  the  track  he  has 
drawn  for  himself  in  some  previous  state  of  being.  Work 
among  such  people  needs  a  deep  conviction  of  its  necessity, 
firm  faith  in  its  ultimate  success,  a  comprehensive  and  sym- 
pathetic knowledge  of  the  type  of  mind  to  be  dealt  with, 
delicacy  and  tact  in  dealing  with  it  and  an  unwearied  pa- 
tience in  waiting  for  the  result.  For,  as  an  experienced  mis- 
sionary observes,  "  A  man  cannot  shed  the  assumptions  of  a 
lifetime,  with  centuries  at  the  back  of  that,  in  an  hour,  as  a 
snake  would  shed  its  skin."  * 

4.  But  if  a  missionary  policy  suited  to  the  times  needs  to 
adjust  itself  to  the  diversified  temperament  and  varying  con- 
dition of  the  ethnic  mind,  it  must  keep  equally  in  view  the 
one  aim  of  all  missionary  effort,  which  is  primarily  and 
chiefly  not  to  educate  nor  to  civilize,  but  to  evangelize  and 
save  the  people.     Slowly  missionary  organizations  of  every 

*  Rev.  Henry  Haigh,  Rlissionarj'  in  Madras, 


212  Ecce  Clerus 

denomination  are  waking  up  to  the  fact  that  the  time  and 
money  heretofore  expended  on  education  other  than  the 
elementary  training  of  the  children  of  avowed  converts  are 
worse  than  wasted,  inasmuch  as  such  education  actually 
furnishes  aid  and  comfort  to  the  enemy  and  puts  into  his 
hand  a  weapon  which  is  often  used  with  deadly  effect  against 
Christianity  itself.  Writing  from  the  Government  House, 
Calcutta,  a  well-known  member  of  the  British  House  of 
Commons,  a  leading  Baptist  in  the  city  of  Liverpool,  and  a 
generous  supporter  of  Christian  missions,  the  Right  Hon. 
W.  S.  Caine,  says  :  "  It  is  a  melancholy  fact  that,  although  the 
powerful  and  wealthy  missionary  organization  of  India  has 
borne  a  large  share  in  the  Western  education  of  the  natives, 
the  number  of  young  men  educated  by  them  who  become 
Christians  is  almost  an  imperceptible  fraction.  The  work 
which  missionaries  are  doing  in  the  way  of  education  is  be- 
yond praise,  viewed  as  education  work  simply  ;  but,  so  far 
as  turning  the  young  men  they  educate  into  Christians  is 
concerned,  their  failure  is  complete  and  unmistakable. 

*'I  have  seen  no  better  college  in  India  than  the  vigorous 
institution  founded  at  Lahore  by  the  American  Presbyterian 
Mission  ;  a  college  so  popular  that  it  contains  more  students 
than  its  government  rival.  Its  staff  consists  of  five  graduates 
of  universities,  with  able  assistants.  Its  professors  teach 
mental  and  moral  philosophy,  English  literature,  chemistry, 
logic,  higher  mathematics,  physics,  Persian,  Sanskrit,  and 
Arabic.  There  are  one  hundred  and  thirty  students,  all 
working  up  to  the  university,  sixty-five  of  whom  are  already 
undergraduates.  Nearly  all  these  youths  come  in  from  a 
fine  school  in  Lahore  city  connected  with  the  same  mission. 
These  students  are  literally  soaked  in  evangelical  truths  for 
years.  The  state  of  their  minds  toward  religion  is  aptly 
suggested  in  a  paragragh  of  the  interesting  report  of  the  col- 
lege, which  says,  'One  of  the  brightest  and  most  promising 
of  the  students  said  not  long  ago — voicing,  no  doubt,  the 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         213 

sentiments  of  his  class-fellows — "  We  do  not  believe  in  Hin- 
duism ;  we  have  no  religion  now,  we  are  looking  for  a  reli- 
gion.'"" 

Mr.  Caine  quotes  from  the  last  annual  report  of  the 
Baptist  Missionary  Society  the  following  words :  "  It  can- 
not be  too  often  repeated  that  the  one  supreme  need  of  the 
heathen  world  is  a  personal  knowledge  and  acceptance  of 
Jesus  Christ  and  his  salvation.  The  great  aim  of  our 
brethren  the  missionaries  is  to  Christianize  by  means  of  the 
fearless,  loving  proclamation  of  the  blessed  Gospel  of  the 
grace  of  God,"  and  then  remarks :  *'  It  may  shock  some  of 
those  who  subscribe  to  its  funds  to  know  that  this  object  is 
being  partly  attained  by  the  employment  of  unconverted 
Hindu  or  Mohammedan  teachers  in  many  of  their  day 
schools,  and  that  this  is  rendered  inevitable  by  the  impos- 
sibility of  filling  the  posts  from  the  native  churches  them- 
selves. .  .  . 

"  Only  the  other  day,  at  Madras,  a  whole  college  struck 
work  because  it  was  rumored  that  one  of  the  students  was 
going  to  be  baptized.  How  many  converts  have  been  made 
at  the  London  Missionary  Society's  [Congregational]  Col- 
lege at  Benares  ?  I  doubt  greatly  if  there  has  been  one  . . . 
A  college  education  in  India,  even  when  conducted  by  mis- 
sionaries, only  appears  to  loosen  faith  in  all  religions  and 
destroy  the  moral  restraint  which  comes  from  faith  of  any 
kind."* 

Other  careful  observers  who  have  traveled  extensively  in 
India  and  made  a  thorough  study  of  the  educational  work 
of  its  missionary  organizations  bear  a  similar  witness.  "  What 
becomes  of  the  Indian  alumni  of  the  college  or  university.?  " 
asks  Bishop  Hurst,  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal  Church, 
and  answers,  "  Of  the  many  who  finish  the  curriculum  but 
a  small  fraction  are  Christian  or  have  any  positive  Christian 
sympathy."  f      After    exhibiting    by    cold    and    impartially 

*  W.  S.  Caine's  Letters  from  India,  No.  ix.  t  Indika,  p.  386. 


214  Ecce  Clerus 

selected  statistics  the  startling  inefficiency  and  failure  of  the 
educational  policy  of  his  own  and  other  denominations  in 
India  Mr.  Caine  proceeds  to  say  :  **  I  am  quite  sure  that  if 
the  whole  energy  and  income  of  missionary  societies  in  India 
were  concentrated  on  work  whose  sole  object  was  conver- 
sion to  a  living  faith  in  Christ,  the  results  would  be  far  dif- 
ferent ; "  and  he  concludes  with  the  stimulating  conviction 
that  "  there  never  was  a  heathen  nation  more  ripe  for 
Christianity  than  India."* 

5.  Finally  a  policy  of  advance  and  triumph  must  make 
larger  and  freer  concession  to  the  intellectual  idiosyncrasies 
and  social  usages  and  customs  of  heathen  peoples.  The 
fatal  temptation  of  the  Christian  Church  in  every  age  has 
been  to  unduly  magnify  the  outward  and  nonessential  fea- 
tures of  religion  while  failing  to  give  sufficient  prominence 
to  truths  that  are  the  very  salt  of  life,  and  to  virtues  that 
are  the  essence  of  the  soul's  abiding  strength  and  glory.  And 
this  mistake,  which  has  hampered  her  onward  movement  in 
so-called  Christian  countries,  has  been  equally  adverse  to 
her  success  among  the  heathen.  She  has  defeated  her  own 
purpose  and  retarded  the  triumph  for  which  she  has  un- 
ceasingly prayed  and  sighed  by  seeming  to  demand  more  in 
sacrifice  and  suffering  than  she  had  to  offer  in  life  and  love, 
in  peace  and  joy  and  consolation. 

The  grand  achievement  of  the  Church  of  the  twentieth 
century  will  be  to  distinguish  with  a  breadth  and  clearness 


*  Caine's  Letters.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  clear  from  opinions  and  testimonies  elicited 
a  few  years  ago  by  the  Foreign  Missions  Committee  of  the  Church  of  Scotland 
from  various  individuals,  either  now  or  at  one  time  in  high  official  station  in  India, 
that  the  educational  work  of  the  various  denominational  missions  is  highly  valued 
by  the  government.  Sir  William  Muir,  principal  of  the  University  of  Edinburgh, 
formerly  secretary  to  the  government  of  India,  hesitated  not  to  say  "  that  it  would 
be  a  calamity  for  India  if  missionary  schools  were  withdrawn."  Sir  William  Wilson 
Hunter,  M.A.  LL.D.;  Sir  Charles  U.  Aitchison,  at  one  time  lieutenant  governor 
of  the  Punjab;  Lord  Dufferin,  for  some  years  viceroy  of  India;  Sir  Henry  Ramsay, 
and  several  others  express  similar  convictions.  It  may  be  observed,  however,  that  no 
one,  no  matter  what  maybe  his  views  as  to  the  educational  policy  of  missionary  boards, 
committees,  etc.,  really  doubts  the  immense  secular  and  civil  advantages  of  education. 
The  question  is.  Is  this  the  kind  of  work  which,  in  view  of  the  experience  of  the  past, 
offers  the  prospect  of  largest  spiritual  returns  for  the  money,  time,  and  energy  of  the 
Christian  Church  ? 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         215 

hitherto  unknown  between  the  soul  and  the  body,  between 
the  essential  life  and  the  mere  livery  of  religion,  and  to  find 
out  a  way  of  making  the  heathen  happy  and  exemplary 
Christians,  while  leaving  them  practically  unchanged  in 
their  national  characteristics  of  thought,  of  speech,  of  man- 
ner, of  social  and  domestic  usage — making  them  Christians, 
in  a  word,  without  unmaking  them  as  Chinamen,  Hindus, 
Japanese,  Africans, 

That  this  possibility  has  dawned  on  thoughtful  minds 
and  is  slowly  shaping  itself  into  a  practical  policy  is  clear 
from  the  words  of  a  scholarly  Wesleyan  missionary  in  India. 
After  pointing  out  that,  though  "the  first  preachers  of  Chris- 
tianity began  with  the  simple  proclamation  of  the  Gospel  to 
the  individual,  they  had  soon  to  pass  on  to  an  enlarged  study 
and  exposition  of  the  principles  of  the  life  and  law  of  Christ 
in  their  relation  to  societies  and  communities,"  he  says : 
*'  In  a  country  like  India  the  new  religion  has  to  determine 
the  attitude  it  shall  adopt  and  the  relation  in  which  it  shall 
stand  to  the  long-established  customs,  tastes,  and  tendencies, 
the  manifold  characteristics,  intellectual,  aesthetic,  moral, 
and  religious,  of  an  ancient  civilized  people.  Among  a  race 
like  the  Fijians,  of  primitive  fashions  and  passions,  with  cus- 
toms and  ideas  in  a  perpetual  flux,  the  task  of  adjustment 
may  be  an  easy  one.  We  may  send  to  them  our  English 
nineteenth  century  Christianity,  not  only  in  its  essential 
power,  but  in  all  its  modes  and  expressions,  and  imprint  it 
entire  on  that  plastic  material.  So  that  in  the  religious  life 
of  Fiji  to-day  we  might  almost  find  repeated  the  religious 
life  of  English  village  Methodism,  the  same  forms  of  wor- 
ship, the  same  institutions,  doctrines,  sentiments.  But  when 
we  picture  to  ourselves  a  Christianized  India  we  cannot 
imagine  it  as  a  congeries  of  millions  of  units  who  shall  all 
have  docilely  imbibed  the  doctrines,  adopted  the  practices, 
taken  the  stamp  of  the  various  types  of  Christianity — Meth- 
odist, Anglican,  Presbyterian,  etc. — that  we  bring  to  them 


216  Ecce  Clerus 

from  the  West.  It  would  be  a  crude  and  hasty  assumption 
indeed  to  suppose  it  is  either  desirable  or  possible  that  Brit- 
ish Methodists  or  British  Methodism  should  be  reproduced 
unchanged  in  the  churches  we  are  planting  in  India.  Sober 
thought  recognizes  that  just  as  the  English  Christian  is  a 
product  of  the  operation  of  divine  grace  upon  that  strongly 
marked  type  of  character  which  we  call  English,  so  the 
Indian  Christian  of  the  India  that  is  to  be  will  be  a  new 
product,  formed  by  the  operation  of  the  same  divine  grace 
upon  very  different  material.  And  as  our  English  forms  of 
worship,  expressions  of  doctrine,  systems  of  Church  govern- 
ment and  organization,  methods  of  work,  have  developed 
under  the  guidance  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  in  adaptation  to  our 
English  character  and  life,  so  it  must  be  expected  that  in 
India,  when  our  religion  is  no  longer  exotic,  but  naturalized 
there,  worship,  organizations,  types  of  thought,  of  character, 
of  activity,  will  come  into  existence  which  will  be  strange 
to  us,  but  will  be  in  harmony  with  the  deep-seated  idiosyn- 
crasies of  that  Eastern  people."  * 

The  principle  of  concession  is  a  true  and  valuable  one. 
But,  if  so,  why  not  incorporate  it  broadly  and  at  once  into 
the  practical  methods  of  missionary  work  in  India  and  else- 
where, and  so,  by  restoring  in  some  measure,  for  example, 
the  original  poverty-stricken  aspect  of  religion's  representa- 
tives, make  it  more  attractive  and  intelligible  to  the  oriental 
mind  ?  "A  Hindu  has  no  sympathy  with  a  missionary, 
however  godly  and  earnest  a  man  he  may  be,  who  lives  in  a 
good  bungalow,  eats  the  sacred  cow,  drives  his  dogcart, 
and  is  in  all  respects  a  'Burra  Sahib.'  Every  teacher  from 
whom  he  has  in  time  past  received  religious  inspiration  is 
associated  in  his  mind  with  asceticism,  self-renunciation, 
poverty,  and  apostolic  simplicity,  Christ,  who  had  not 
where   to  lay  his  head  ;  John  the  Baptist,  in  camels'  hair, 

•  "  How  is  Christianity  to  be  Acclimatized  in  India  ? "    Rev.  W.  H.  Findlay,  in 
Methodist  Timet. 


Missionaries  of  the  Twentieth  Century         217 

eating  locusts  and  honey;  Paul,  working  with  his  own 
hands;  the  Jesuit  preacher,in  Brahman  dress  with  his  begging 
bowl,  and  the  barefooted  Salvation  Army  captain — these 
they  can  understand."  Has  not  modern  Christianity  suf- 
ficient of  the  spirit  of  heroic  self-effacement — enough  of  the 
genius  of  accommodation  and  self-adjustment  to  circum- 
stances— to  capture  India  by  approaching  her  in  forms  she 
has  always  instinctively  and  warmly  welcomed  ?  in  forms 
of  lowliness,  self-denial,  abstemiousness,  dependence,  bare  of 
foot,  poor  in  purse  and  garment,  but  rich  in  faith,  in  courage, 
in  kindliness  and  love?  Shall  she  to-day,  with  such  splen- 
did prizes  within  her  grasp  as  India,  China,  Japan,  fail  to 
make  good  her  ancient  boast  of  "becoming  all  things  to  all 
men,  that  she  may  by  all  means  save  some  ? "  Has  the 
Francis  Xavier,  Robert  de  Nobile,  Wiliam  Carey,  and  Henry 
Martyn  type  of  missionary  become  hopelessly  obsolete  ?  of 
whom  a  reputable  historian  says  :  "  They  renounced  all 
riches,  dignities,  honors,  friends,  and  kindred ;  they  desired 
to  have  nothing  of  this  world  ;  they  scarcely  took  the  nec- 
essaries of  life ;  attention  to  the  body,  even  when  needful, 
was  irksome  to  them.  .  .  .  They  were  given  as  an  example 
for  all  religions.  Their  footsteps  remaining  still  bear  wit- 
ness that  they  were  right,  holy,  and  perfect  men  who,  waging 
war  so  stoutly,  trod  the  world  under  their  feet ;  "  and  con- 
cerning whom  a  recent  writer  declares  that  "they  have  left 
their  mark  on  India  as  no  other  missionaries  have  ever 
done,  and  their  disciples  form  to-day  nearly  two  thirds  of 
the  Christian  population  of  India." 


218  Ecce  Clerus 


CHAPTER  X 

The  Itinerant  and   Settled  Pastorates   G>mpared    and 
G>ntrasted 

Their  voice  was  soon  heard  in  the  wildest  and  most  barbarous  comers  of 
the  land,  in  the  dens  of  London,  or  in  the  long  galleries  where,  in  the  pauses 
of  his  labor,  the  Cornish  miner  listens  to  the  sobbing  of  the  sea. — Anon. 

And  that  voice  was  a  jubilatic  one — it  proclaimed  among  our  hills  and 
valleys  the  great,  soul-saving  elementary  truths  of  Christianity,  with  the 
demonstration  of  the  Spirit  and  power.  Such  men,  with  such  elements  of 
moral  force,  could  not  but  succeed.  Their  success  is  not  a  mystery.  The 
only  problem  of  their  history  is  that  a  class  of  men  so  unique,  so  uniformly 
heroic  in  spirit,  and  gigantic  in  energy,  so  persistent  against  all  odds,  and  so 
calmly  and  confidently  self-conscious  of  success,  and  even  of  great  historical 
destinies,  should  be  found  among  us,  and  should  year  after  year  continue  to 
prosecute  their  unparalleled  labors  by  the  most  simple  machinery,  and  with 
scarcely  any  appreciable  means  of  support.  .  ,  .  The  men  we  have  been  com- 
memorating wrought  out  into  an  energetic  and  historical  reality  what  the 
logic  of  the  philosopher  and  the  sagacity  of  the  statesman  would  have  pro- 
nounced impracticable  to  human  nature.  Down  to  the  date  at  which  we  now, 
with  truest  admiration,  take  our  leave  of  them  most  of  them  denied  them- 
selves the  enjoyments  of  domestic  life  and  remained  single,  that  they  might 
the  more  utterly  consecrate  themselves  to  their  labors. — Stevens,  "  Memorials 
of  Methodism." 

}•  The  Itinerant  Ministry  not  an  Institution  of  Modem  Origin* 

The  itinerant  pastorate  is  an  institution  distinctive  of 
ecumenical  Methodism.  To  cursory  students  of  Church 
history  it  has  doubtless  seemed  a  new  and  modern  device 
compared  with  the  system  of  the  settled  pastorate,  with  its 
high  antiquity,  its  almost  universal  adoption,  and  the 
magnificent  array  of  saintly,  scholarly,  and  even  illustrious 
names  that  adorn  the  annals  of  its  history.  So  far,  how- 
ever, from  being  a  recent  and  novel  type  of  the  Christian 
pastorate,  it  is  in  reality  very  old.  It  is  a  reversion  not 
only  to  the  primitive  and  original  order,  but  to  a  type  recur- 


Itinerant  and  Settled  Pastorates  Compared     219 

ring  more  than  once  during  the  Middle  Ages,  and  though  at 
present  efforts  are  being  made  within  some  of  the  older, 
larger,  and  more  influential  of  the  denominations  of  which 
it  is  a  leading  characteristic  to  discredit  and  supplant  it,  it 
is  doubtful  whether  the  world  will  ever  be  able  to  dispense 
with  the  itinerating  evangelist — the  peddler  of  salvation,  A 
wandering  ministry  answers  a  stronger  instinct  in  human 
nature  than  the  settled  pastorate,  and  satisfies  profounder 
needs  of  the  soul.  Man  is  by  nature  a  rambling  stone — a 
tramp,  a  vagabond.  Without  his  migration  from  side  to 
side  of  the  broad  stage  of  the  world — a  propensity  which 
modern  civilization  seems  rather  to  strengthen  than  to  dis- 
courage— and  the  consequent  displacement  of  large  popula- 
tions to  which  this  wandering  instinct  has  led  in  Asia  and 
Europe  in  ancient  times ;  in  America,  Australasia,  and  Africa 
in  more  recent  times,  the  whole  romance  of  history  would 
be  lost  and  the  progress  of  the  race  seriously  impeded  if 
not  brought  to  a  standstill,*  He  is  a  wanderer  in  search  of 
good  until  the  restless  spirit  within  him  is  satisfied  and 
tranquillized  by  the  chief  good  ;  and  when  he  has  found  for 
himself  the  greatest  of  all  blessings  he  is  then  apt  to  become 
an  itinerant  in  the  interests  of  its  announcement  and  diffu- 
sion. The  vexed  question  as  to  the  relative  age  of  Episco- 
pacy and  Presbyterianism  as  ecclesiastical  regimes  is,  in 
some  of  its  phases  at  least,  an  open  one,  and  is  likely  to  be 
interminable;  but  there  is  not  and  cannot  be  any  dispute  as 
to  the  relative  antiquity  of  the  itinerant  ministry  and  the 
settled  pastorate  in  the  mind  of  anyone  acquainted  with  the 
New  Testament  Scriptures  and  the  history  of  the  apostolic 
and  subapostolic  Church.  Nor  can  it  be  disputed  that  this 
was  the  style  of  organization  that  most  commended  itself  to 

*  The  rejuvenescence  of  a  decaying  civilization  by  the  introduction  of  fresh  blood 
into  the  veins  of  deteriorated  peoples  is  perhaps  nowhere  better  illustrated  than  in 
Sheppard's  Fall  of  Rome  and  Rise  of  the  Nationalities,  but  the  inborn  passion  of  the 
wanderer  was  as  characteristic  of  the  dawn  of  civilization  as  of  its  later  stages. 
See  Gen.  x,  xi ;  also  Sayce's  Patriarchal  Palestine,  and  Higher  Criticism  and  Verdict 
of  the  Monuments. 


220  Ecce  Clerus 

the  leaders  of  all  the  most  potent  and  most  popular  religious 
movements  of  the  mediaeval  Church,  notably  that  of  St. 
Francis  d'Assisi  and  his  Brothers  Minor,*  and  that  of  St, 
Dominic  in  Italy,  and  the  later  propaganda  of  Wyclif  and 
his  poor  friars  in  England. 

2.  Founder  of  the  Methodist  Itinerancy. 

The  annals  of  Christianity,  however,  nowhere  display  a 
consecration  to  the  service  of  God  and  humanity  more 
unreserved,  more  comprehensive,  or  more  complete  than  is 
found  in  the  record  of  the  labors  and  travels  of  the  founder 
of  Methodism.  Temporary  inconvenience,  occasional  pri- 
vation and  hardship,  exposure  to  criticism,  persecution,  and 
mortal  peril,  have  often  been  incurred  for  the  sake  of  some 
desirable  worldly  object.  Some  have  found  it  easy  to  go 
through  a  little  dirt  to  great  dignity,  or  "  wade  through 
slaughter  to  a  throne."  But  the  man  who  calmly  braved  the 
fury  of  the  mob  at  Wednesbury,  Walsall,  and  Bolton  ;  who 
traveled  thousands  of  miles  over  rough  roads  in  all  kinds  of 
weather  for  half  a  century;  who  rose  every  morning  at  four 
to  break  the  "  bread  of  life  "  to  hungry  souls  an  hour  later ; 
who  during  his  early  labors  was  never  sure  of  either  board 
or  shelter ;  whose  incessant  toils  and  anxieties  brought  him 
neither  wealth,  fame,  power,  nor  promotion,  could  not  be 
actuated  by  any  but  the  highest  conceivable  motives.  The 
aim  he  set  before  his  preachers  was  the  object  that  absorbed 
his  own  soul.  In  the  conclusion  of  his  twelve  rules  of  a 
helper  he  says  :  "Observe,  it  is  not  your  business  to  preach 
so  many  times,  and  to  take  care  merely  of  this  or  that 
society,  but  to  save  as  many  souls  as  you  can,  to  bring  as 
many  sinners  as  you  possibly  can  to  repentance,  and  with 
all  your  power  to  build  them  up  in  that  holiness  without 
which  they  cannot  see  the  Lord." 

Wesley's  whole  life  was  one  ceaseless  self-repression,  one 

•  Paul  Sabatier's  Life  of  St.  Francis  tf  Assist. 


Itinerant  and  Settled  Pastorates  Compared     221 

powerful  and  victorious  eflfort  of  self-mastery.  At  times  this 
spirit  of  self-obliteration  assumes  a  form  at  once  pathetic 
and  sublime ;  as  when,  after  returning  to  the  fine  old 
Northumbrian  town  of  Newcastle-on-Tyne,  he  records  in 
his  Journal :  "  Certainly,  if  I  did  not  believe  there  was 
another  world,  I  should  spend  all  my  summers  here,  as  I 
know  no  place  in  Great  Britain  comparable  to  it  for  pleas- 
antness. But  I  seek  another  country,  and  therefore  am 
content  to  be  a  wanderer  upon  earth."  At  other  times  the 
element  of  comedy  predominates.  During  one  of  his 
earliest  visits  to  Cornwall  the  people  omitted  to  invite  him 
and  his  companion  in  toil  and  travel  to  a  meal.  Finding 
that  the  bushes  by  the  wayside  yielded  a  plentiful  supply  of 
ripe  blackberries,  he  records  his  heartfelt  thankfulness  to  God 
that  the  needs  of  the  body  are  met  in  this  way  by  the  free 
bounty  of  nature.  On  another  occasion  he  and  his  faithful 
henchman  and  helper,  Nelson,  are  obliged  to  sleep  on  the 
floor  for  nearly  a  month.  Nelson,  extemporizing  a  pillow  for 
his  own  weary  head  of  the  great  quarto  volume  of  Burkitfs 
N'otes,  folds  his  own  greatcoat  for  Wesley  to  rest  his  head 
on.  An  hour  before  the  time  for  rising  Wesley,  on  turning 
over,  finds  his  companion  already  awake,  and  clapping  him 
on  the  side,  remarks  in  that  vein  of  irrepressible  humor 
which  always  characterized  him,  "  Brother  Nelson,  let  us  be 
of  good  cheer ;  I  have  one  whole  side  yet." 

3.  Itinerancy  Defensible  on  the  Plea  of  Past  Utility  and  of  High  and 
Ancient  Example* 

To  itinerancy  in  itself  neither  stigma  nor  special  sanctity 
attaches.  Everything  depends  on  how  a  man  does  his 
wandering;  from  what  motives;  with  what  objects  in  view. 
All  the  great  poets,  philosophers,  and  historians  of  the 
ancient  world  traveled  extensively.  It  was  an  essential  part 
of  the  profession  of  poet,  philosopher,  historian,  to  see 
strange  lands  and  scenes  and  peoples,  and  know  foreign 


222  Ecce  Clerus 

customs  and  opinions.  And  when  the  apostle  Paul  in  the 
course  of  his  missionary  journeys  reached  Athens  they  took 
him  for  one  of  those  knowledge-seeking  pilgrims  to  whom 
it  was  their  wont  to  give  the  strikingly  appropriate  though 
somewhat  contemptuous  name  of  spermologoi — pickers-up 
of  stray  seeds  of  truth,  gatherers  of  scraps  of  news,  and 
odds  and  ends  of  information.  And  so  they  said  with 
ill-disguised  contempt :  "  What  will  this  babbler,  or  rather 
this  spermologos — this  dealer  in  ill-digested  scraps  of  phi- 
losophy— say  to  us?"  They  took  him  for  a  hungry,  migra- 
tory bird  from  some  far-off,  famine-stricken  region,  who 
had  alighted  among  the  better-fed  barnyard  fowl  of  the 
"  city  of  the  gods,"  to  snatch  from  the  once  famous  floors  of 
the  Lyceum,  the  Porch,  or  the  Groves  of  the  Academy  a 
mouthful  of  the  choicest  grain  of  Greek  philosophy.  They 
had,  however,  entirely  mistaken  the  spirit  and  purpose  of 
his  mission,  as  they  discovered  later.  He  had  come  not  to 
ask  them  for  anything  except  it  were — like  Antonius  in 
the  Roman  Forum  with  the  warm  eulogy  of  Caesar  on  his 
lips — "to  lend  him  their  ears,"  that  he  might  tell  them  of 
"  the  God  that  made  the  world  and  all  things  therein, 
he,  being  Lord  of  heaven  and  earth,  dwelleth  not  in  tem- 
ples made  with  hands;  neither  is  he  served  hymen's  hands, 
as  though  he  needed  anything,  seeing  he  himself  giveth  to 
all  life,  and  breath,  and  all  things."  In  other  words,  the 
apostle,  like  every  true  Methodist  preacher,  itinerated  not 
to  impoverish  but  to  enrich  the  world  by  making  known  to 
it  "  the  unsearchable  riches  of  Christ,"  and  bringing  to  those 
who  believed  the  sovereign  joy  of  a  present  and  personal 
salvation. 

This  lofty  purpose  of  his  wandering  mission  brings  the 
self-denying  itinerant  into  intimate  affinity  and  fellowship 
with  the  noblest  and  most  beneficent  souls  of  history. 
Many  years  ago,  as  the  present  writer  was  informed,  during 
a  summer  tour  in  Wales,  a  man  selling  ornamental  trinkets 


Itinerant  and  Settled  Pastorates  Compared     223 

and  cheap  jewelry  stood  under  the  deep  shadow  of  the  ruins 
of  an  old  Welsh  castle.  He  was  a  thoroughly  educated 
man,  a  gentleman  in  bearing,  breeding,  manner,  and  speech. 
As  the  crowd  of  tourists  passed  over  the  bridge  that  con- 
nects the  railway  depot  with  the  ancient  ruins  of  the  castle 
and  with  the  old  town  of  Conway  they  were  attracted  and 
charmed  by  the  spontaneous  eloquence  of  the  peddler's 
speech.  "I  am  a  vagabond,"  he  said,  "and  belong  to  the 
noble  and  ancient  race  of  vagabonds.  I  am  not  ashamed 
either  of  the  name  or  the  calling  of  a  vagabond,  for  this 
same  element  of  vagabondism  enters  into  the  nature  and 
function  of  all  noblest  things.  There  is  your  beautiful 
Welsh  river  wandering  through  meadow,  wood,  and  wheat 
field,  fertilizing  the  farms  and  adorning  the  landscape  and 
dispensing  a  thousand  blessings  to  man  and  bird  and  beast 
as  it  hurries  to  the  sea.  Down  from  the  central  hills  of 
the  land  the  graceful  wanderer  flows,  and  you  call  it  the 
*Wye,'  which  is  a  corruption  of  the  ancient  Roman  word 
Vaga — the  wanderer — the  beautiful  vagabond.  The  Father 
of  the  faithful,"  he  continued,  "was  all  his  days  a  wanderer, 
'seeking  a  better  country — that  is,  a  heavenly.'  Jehovah 
himself  is  *a  stranger  in  the  land,  and  a  wayfarer  who 
turneth  aside  to  tarry  for  a  night.'  'And  Jesus  went  about 
all  Galilee,  teaching  in  their  synagogues,  and  preaching  the 
Gospel  of  the  kingdom.'  And  I,  like  the  greatest  religious 
reformer  and  evangelist  of  the  last  century,  *  seek  another 
country,'  and  therefore  am  content  to  be  a  wanderer  among 
men."* 

*  When  this  anecdote  was  published  by  the  author  in  a  contribution  to  a  well-known 
religious  weekly,  having  an  extensive  circulation  in  New  England,  a  former  editor  of 
that  paper,  who  has  since  gone  home  to  God,  full  of  years  and  honors,  challenged  the 
narrative's  originality  and  charged  the  writer  with  plagiarism.  The  accuser  wrote  the 
editor  to  say  that  the  article  in  which  the  story  appeared  was  taken  bodily  from  the  Rev. 
Paxton  Hood's  Peerage  of  Poverty.  It  is  a  curious  illustration  of  the  haste  and  hazard  of 
nearly  all  such  charges  that  when,  after  considerable  search  in  a  large  public  library  the 
author  secured  for  the  first  time  a  sight  of  Hood's  book,  he  found  that  his  own  version  of 
the  story  and  Hood's  were  so  entirely  different,  except  in  a  few  general  features,  that  it 
was  not  possible  for  either  of  them  to  have  been  a  copy  of  the  other.  Hood's  version, 
which  is  contained  in  a  dozen  lines  on  the  first  page  of  his  book,  omits  some  of  the  most 
interesting  details,  and  places  the  scene  of  the  incident  in  a  different  part  of  Wales. 


224  Ecce  Clerus 

4.  Develops  a  Noble  Type  of  Character  and  a  Fine  Sense  of  Brother- 
hood. 

One  marked  advantage  of  the  itinerant  fraternity  as  it  ap- 
pears to  an  outsider  is  that  each  member  feels  it  incumbent 
on  him,  as  sharing  its  peculiar  honors  and  privileges,  to 
preserve  the  type  in  its  best  form  and  fullest  efficiency,  be- 
ing unwilling  through  lack  of  personal  fidelity,  self-control, 
and  painstaking  to  allow  his  fair  inheritance  to  get  over- 
grown with  brush  and  weeds,  and  become  a  tangled  "wil- 
derness, open  to  the  incursions  of  the  wild  boar  of  the  forest," 
to  use  the  words  of  Wesley,  inviting  the  pity  or  provoking 
the  contempt  of  his  neighbors. 

It  is  a  matter  of  authentic  record  that  for  vigorous  faith  in 
God,  for  a  generous  and  self-sacrificing  love  for  human  souls, 
for  warm,  brotherly  affection  and  unity  among  themselves, 
for  a  keen  and  clear  spiritual  insight  and  a  sound  and  sober 
judgment,  for  zeal  and  energy,  self-restraint  and  circumspec- 
tion, for  unsparing  toils,  and  the  noblest  and  most  enduring 
kind  of  success,  the  early  Methodist  itinerants  set  an  ex- 
ample that  won  the  admiration  of  mankind  notwithstanding 
the  difficulties  that  challenged  their  courage  and  tried  their 
souls.  They  were  not  without  the  capability  of  appreciating 
the  happier  circumstances  of  fellow-laborers  in  other  fields. 
Amid  the  hardships  and  privations  to  which  they  were  con- 
stantly exposed  tempting  visions  of  a  condition  very  differ- 
ent from  their  own  occasionally  floated  before  their  eyes. 
"To  rise  early,  read  and  pray  a  few  hours,  take  breakfast, 
have  family  worship,  and  then  pass  on  from  house  to  house, 
from  appointment  to  appointment,  as  our  custom  was,  we 
found  to  be  laborious,  wearing,  and  tiresome  work ;  but  the 
Lord  was  with  us,  and  gave  us  to  see  scores  of  sinners  con- 

The  present  writer  gave  the  story  as  it  was  told_  him  during  a  vacation  spent  in  the 
principality,  and  Paxton  Hood  evidently  got  his  information  from  a  similar  source, 
namely,  the  floating  folklore  of  the  country.  It  is  only  fair  to  say  that  when  the  au- 
thor pointed  this  out  and  proposed  to  his  accuser  to  place  his  own  version  and  Hood's 
before  competent  literarj'  arbiters,  and  let  them  decide,  he  had  the  candor  to  confess 
himself,  for  once,  mistaken.    "  My  criticism,"  he  said,  "  is  logically  dead." 


Itinerant  and  Settled  Pastorates  Compared     225 

verted  to  God  ;  and  their  songs  of  praise  cheered  us  in  the 
glorious  work."  The  writer  of  these  words  records  that  on 
a  certain  occasion  "  he  was  nearly  two  hours  passing  through 
a  snowdrift  which  was  four  or  five  feet  deep,"  "  I  dis- 
mounted," he  says,  "  and  made  my  way  through  ahead  of 
my  horse,  as  far  as  I  could  without  letting  go  of  the  bridle- 
rein  ;  and  then  he  would  leap  and  v  .How  up  to  me  and  wait 
until  I  had  again  made  a  track.  The  storm  was  so  severe 
that  I  found  it  difficult,  at  times,  to  catch  my  breath,  and 
our  path  was  filled  as  fast  as  we  left  it."  * 

Among  other  "  rich  and  refreshing  meditations  "  to  which 
such  scenes  and  situations  gave  rise  the  following  dialogue 
is  given  as  a  specimen : 

Q.  Who  is  that  up  to  his  arms  in  the  snow  ? 

A.  A  Methodist  preacher. 

Q.  Who  is  that  in  a  snug  study  by  his  warm  fire  ? 

A.  The  honorable  settle'^  minister. 

Q.  What  is  the  Methodise  preacher  doing.'* 

A.  Making  his  way  to  his  appointment,  where  he  hopes  to 
call  sinners  to  repentance. 

Q.  What  is  the  settled  minister  doing.? 

A.  Hunting  his  library  over,  selecting  portions,  and  adding, 
perhaps,  some  of  his  own  thoughts,  and  writing  out  a  sermon 
to  read  over  to  the  people  next  Sabbath. 

Q.  Which  of  them  looks  most  like  a  lazy  man,  and  which 
gets  the  most  money,  the  most  reproaches,  or  follows  the 
example  of  Christ  and  the  apostles  nearest,  in  traveling, 
suffering,  preaching,  self-denyings,  watchings,  fastings,  and 
winning  souls  to  Christ  ? 

Here  my  mind  looked  back  and  saw  Jesus,  weary,  sitting 
on  Jacob's  well,  Paul  tossing  on  the  rolling  waves  and  ship- 
wrecked on  Miletus,  and  John  on  the  desolate  isle  of  Patmos. 
And  my  soul  cried  out,  in  the  midst  of  the  tempest,  "O, 
Lord,  permit  me  to  wear  out  in  thy  service. "f 

*  Stevens's  Memorials  of  Methodism,  p.  413.    t  Stevens's  Memorials  0/  Methodism, 

15 


226  Ecce  Clems 

There  was  from  the  start  a  feeling  of  brotherhood,  a  bond 
of  fellowship  which  in  its  genuineness  and  warmth  com- 
pletely obliterated  all  distinctions  of  rank  or  office.  Hardly 
anything  can  exceed  the  apostolic  simplicity  and  beauty  of 
the  scene  described  in  the  following  narrative  :  '*  The  next 
morning  I  started,  in  company  with  several  other  preachers, 
for  Conference,  which  sat  in  Monmouth,  Me.  After  a  few 
hours'  ride  we  halted  in  a  grove  and  let  our  horses  feed  in 
the  highway,  while  we  held  a  prayer  meeting.  It  was  a 
blessed  season.  We  then  passed  on,  meeting  with  great 
kindness,  as  though  the  Lord  had  given  the  people  a  com- 
mand to  entertain  us  for  his  sake.  On  the  morning  before 
we  reached  Monmouth  we  fell  in  with  Bishop  Asbury,  and 
brought  the  rear  of  more  than  a  score  of  itinerant  Methodist 
preachers.  About  ten  o'clock  we  stopped  at  a  tavern  and 
called  for  a  room.  After  we  had  rested  about  half  an  hour 
Asbury  said,  *  We  must  have  prayers  before  we  leave  ;  I  will 
go  and  give  notice  to  the  landlord,  and  some  of  you  must 
pray.'  I  followed  him  to  the  barroom,  to  learn  his  skill  and 
manner.  He  said,  *  Landlord,  we  are  going  to  have  prayers 
in  our  room ;  and  if  you  or  any  of  your  family  wish  to  at- 
tend, we  should  be  happy  to  have  you.'  *  Thank  you,  sir, 
he  replied  ;  'please  wait  until  I  speak  not  only  to  my  family, 
but  my  neighbors.'  Soon  they  flocked  in;  we  sung  and 
prayed,  and  melting  mercy  moved  our  hearts.  When  our 
bill  was  called  for  we  were  told  there  was  no  demand  against 
us,  and  were  requested  to  call  again.  How  blessed  to  hold 
up  the  light  of  truth  in  all  places  as  we  pass  along  through 
the  world!  "* 

Such  were  the  character  and  spirit  of  the  early  Methodist 
itinerants.  The  work  was  one  and  the  laborers  were  one, 
and  the  reported  advancement  and  triumph  along  many 
lines  and  on  many  hard-fought  fields  evoked  a  common 
gratitude  and  diffused  a  common  joy.     Troublers  of  Zion 

*  Stevens's  Memorials  o/ Methodism,  p.  442. 


Itinerant  and  Settled  Pastorates  Compared     227 

walked  out  unconstrained  to  stay.  Rivalry  and  personal 
ambition  perished  unwept,  and  envy  and  jealousy  died  with- 
out pity  or  regret.  The  men  of  the  early  Methodist  min- 
istry were  men  of  martial  mold  and  temper,  and  really  en- 
joyed the  "fight  of  faith"  by  which  they  proposed  to  "lay 
hold  on  eternal  life."  No  words  could  have  deeper  mean- 
ing for  anyone  than  the  battle  cry  composed  by  one  of  their 
leaders  had  for  them.  Their  hearts  found  a  real  power  in 
the  now  familiar  strain  : 

Stronger  than  death  and  hell, 

The  sacred  power  we  prove  ; 
And,  conquerors  of  the  world,  we  dwell 

In  heaven  who  dwell  in  love. 

Nor  has  this  splendid  esprit  de  corps — this  sense  of  brotherly 

oneness — perceptibly  declined  in  any  section  of  the  great 

Methodist  host  since  the  founder  of  Methodism  closed  his 

eyes.     To-day   the  stranger  who  goes   into  the  Wesleyan 

Conference  when  the  opening  hymn  is  being  sung — sung  as 

it  was  in  Wesley's  days  : 

And  are  we  yet  alive. 
And  see  each  other's  face  ? 

or  into  any  Annual  Conference  in  this  country  during  the 
opening  prayer  meeting,  sees  strong  men  with  tears  in  their 
eyes,  and  hears  eloquent  men  with  tears  in  their  voices,  and 
finds  himself  in  an  atmosphere  of  brotherly  sympathy  and 
fellowship  for  a  complete  parallel  to  which  he  will  probably 
search  the  Churches  of  all  lands  and  times  in  vain. 

5.  Present  Practical  Value,  an  Item  Worthy  of  Attention, 

The  ideal  of  such  a  relation  is  necessarily  an  exalted  one, 
and  the  man  who  is  bent  on  honoring  it  needs  to  school 
himself  and  his  people  into  the  proper  mood  for  meeting  its 
stern  and  inexorable  requirements.  One  of  the  most  trying 
and  disrelishable  things  any  minister  has  to  do  is  to  leave 
men,  women,  and  young  people  whom  he  has  learned  to  ad- 
mire, esteem,  and  love — persons  whose  fellowship,  sympathy, 


228  Ecce  Clerus 

cooperation,  and  prayers  are  among  the  most  golden  and 
cherished  of  his  memories,  and  whose  names  are  always 
pleasant  music  in  his  ears.  With  the  strength  of  these 
sacred  bonds,  the  charm  and  sweetness  of  these  memories, 
the  Methodist  pastor  is  probably  as  familiar  as  any.  But 
his  calling  as  a  wanderer  demands  the  sacrifice,  in  a  large 
measure,  of  these  relations  which  so  often  make  hard  duties 
delightful  and  trials  and  disappointments  easier  to  bear. 
By  the  will  of  the  appointing  power  one  pastor  leaves  and 
another  "comes  after  him,"  who  may  or  may  not  be  "  pre- 
ferred before  him."  He  comes  to  fill  the  place  his  prede- 
cessor has  just  vacated,  to  seize  the  tools  he  has  just  dropped, 
and  perpetuate  without  break  or  pause  the  hum  of  church 
life  and  activity.  He  comes  to  face  the  difficulties  and 
hindrances  his  predecessor  had  to  face,  contend  against  the 
same  sins  and  errors,  attempt  the  solution  of  the  same 
church  and  parish  problems,  and  commit  similar  follies  and 
mistakes.  And  his  predecessor,  with  genuine  brotherly 
feeling,  uses  the  brief  opportunity  afforded  him  before  his 
departure  of  focusing  on  him,  as  the  coming  man,  the  un- 
divided sympathies,  love,  loyalty,  and  confidence  he  needs 
and  has  a  right  to  expect.  It  is  always  felt  that  it  is  really 
not  a  question  as  to  what  is  due  to  him  who  comes,  or  to 
him  who  goes,  but  as  to  what  is  due  to  a  cause  that  is  greater 
and  nobler  than  either  of  them,  and  to  which  both  alike  owe 
the  best  that  is  in  them.  No  morbid  self-consciousness  and 
self-consequentiality  are  permitted  to  blind  the  eyes  to  the 
grandeur  of  things,  which,  if  they  could  be  seen  in  their 
true  magnitude  and  entire  breadth  and  fullness,  would  go  far 
to  annihilate  all  paltry  personal  ambition  and  extravagant 
self-esteem.  The  itinerant  does  not  dream  of  reversing  the 
divine  and  eternal  order  of  things,  of  presuming  that  the 
Church,  with  all  her  honors,  offices,  and  varied  ministries, 
shall  be  made  subservient  to  his  self-centering  aims  and 
aspirations,  but  heroically  insists  on  his  own  self-effacement 


Itinerant  and  Settled  Pastorates  Compared     229 

and  on  subordinating  himself  and  his  affairs  to  her  sovereign 
claims  and  comprehensive  scope  and  mission.  He  feels 
that,  take  what  he  will  away  from  the  people  he  has  served, 
he  is  obliged  to  leave  behind  all  that  is  most  vital  to  their 
well-being — the  mercy,  love,  patience,  promise,  presence,  and 
power  of  God  ;  and  that  under  the  wise  guidance  and  sleep- 
less care  of  the  Almighty  they  are  not  likely  to  be  much 
worse  off  with  his  erring  successor  than  with  his  equally 
fallible  self. 

Nor  does  it  need  the  faultless  intellectual  poise  and  trained 
faculty  of  a  philosopher  to  perceive  the  progressiveness  of 
God's  purpose — to  see  that  in  spite  of  the  death  or  retirement 
of  intrepid  pioneers  and  skillful  workmen,  sagacious  leaders 
and  lucid  and  eloquent  interpreters  of  modern  life  and 
thought,  the  work  of  God  still  steadily  advances;  that  though 

The  individual  withers,  yet  the  world  is  more  and  more. 

As  a  rule,  what  comes  after  us  is  better  than  ourselves, 
and  the  civilized  world  of  to-day  is  worth,  in  hard  cash 
value,  but  much  more  in  moral  and  intellectual  excellence, 
many  such  worlds  as  our  grandfathers  knew  a  hundred  years 
ago.  There  may  seem  to  be  exceptions  to  this  rule  in  a  few 
cases  of  sequence.  It  cannot  be  said  that  every  individual 
wave  is  stronger  and  larger  than  its  immediate  predecessor; 
still  the  tide  comes  steadily  in.  And  we  ought  to  encour- 
age the  world  around  us  to  expect  not  declension,  but  a 
distinct  improvement  on  ourselves  in  the  person  of  him  who 
comes  to  take  our  place,  and  not  imitate  the  unworthy  jeal- 
ousy for  which  the  world  has  praised  rather  than  blamed  the 
blind  old  poet  of  the  "Iliad."  Like  the  Methodist  itiner- 
ant, he  was  a  wanderer,  as  every  man  who  has  had  immortal 
things  to  do,  or  say,  or  sing  has  been  since  Abram's  day. 
He  was  poor  and  physically  feeble,  though  he  was  to  do 
such  great  things  and  "  to  live  in  the  mouths  of  a  hundred 
generations  and  a  thousand  tribes,"     Blind  and  dependent. 


230  Ecce  Clerus 

his  wanderings   were  such  that  when    he  became  famous 

neither  he  nor  his  friends  could  tell  where  he  started  from ; 

his  birthplace  could  not  be  ascertained.     So  it  was  said : 

Seven  famous  towns  contend  for  Homer  dead. 
Through  which  the  living  Homer  begged  his  bread. 

The  story  is  that  as  he  wandered  over  the  sunny  islands 
of  the  ^gean  and  the  Asiatic  coasts  he  tenderly  entreated 
those  who  had  known  and  loved  him  to  cherish  his  memory 
above  that  of  every  other  minstrel  when  he  was  away.  As 
he  had  been  expected  with  pleasure,  he  hoped  he  would  be 
regretted  when  he  had  gone,  and  would  be  rewarded  by  the 
sympathy  and  praises  of  his  friends  even  in  the  presence  of 
other  minstrels  who  might  come  that  way.  A  set  of  verses 
pretty  well  authenticated  is  ascribed  to  him,  in  which  he 
addresses  the  Delian  women  thus  :  "  Farewell  to  you  all, 
and  remember  me  in  time  to  come,  and  when  any  one  of 
men  on  earth — a  stranger  from  afar — shall  inquire  of  you,  'O 
maidens,  who  is  the  sweetest  of  minstrels  hereabout,  and  in 
whom  do  you  most  delight  ? '  then  make  answer  modestly,  *  It 
is  a  blind  man,  and  he  lives  in  steep  Chios.'  "  * 

6.  Drawbacks  as  Compared  with  the  Settled  Pastorate. 

But  an  itinerant  ministry  as  compared  with  the  settled 
pastorate  has  obvious  disadvantages  as  well  as  some  marks 
of  superiority.  And  no  one  sees  this  more  clearly  than 
those  whose  ecclesiastical  polity  subjects  them  to  a  rigid 
rule  of  periodical  change  of  place.  The  agitation  for  a 
change  in  the  itinerant  law  which  has  existed  for  some 
years  in  the  older  Methodist  denominations,  and  the  modi- 
fications of  it,  long  ago  adopted  by  others,  like  the  English 
Primitive  Methodists  and  the  Free  Church  Methodists,  show 
how  impossible  it  is  to  construe  the  divine  institution  of  the 
ministry  and  devise  an  adequate  arrangement  for  the  evan- 
gelization of  the  world,  so  as  to  combine  in  any  given 

*  See  Newman's  Idea  of  a  University. 


Itinerant  and  Settled  Pastorates  Compared     231 

system  every  desirable  feature  and  eliminate  every  obvious 
fault,  and  adjust  thereby  the  ministration  of  the  living 
word  to  different  ages  and  circumstances  and  to  the  varied 
tastes  and  temperaments  of  mankind. 

Leading  clergymen  and  many  intelligent  laymen  in  the 
Methodist  Episcopal  Church  contend  that,  though  the  restric- 
tion of  the  pastorate  to  a  brief  term  of  years  was  serviceable 
and  necessary  so  long  as  the  denomination  was  distinctively 
evangelistic  and  missionary  in  its  spirit,  policy,  and  methods, 
it  is  impossible  to  maintain  that  feature  in  the  present  altered 
condition  of  affairs  without  serious  injury  and  loss,  espe- 
cially in  large  cities,  which  "are  becoming  the  great  thought 
centers  of  the  nation,  forming  and  shaping  its  politics  and 
its  religious  life."  Says  Dr.  H.  R.  Carroll,  Associate  Editor 
of  The  Independent,  in  an  article  in  Zion's  Herald,  Boston, 
Mass. :  "  A  people's  Church,  as  I  like  to  think  ours  is,  ought  to 
be  strongest  where  the  people  are  most  numerous  ;  but  I 
am  persuaded  that  our  work,  our  influence,  and  our  power 
in  cities  fall  far  below  the  possibilities.  We  are  losing 
constantly  an  element  which  we  ought,  for  every  reason,  to 
retain  ;  and  we  are  losing  it  chiefly  because  of  the  persist- 
ence of  our  arbitrary  rule  which  has  served  its  end,  and 
which  can  be  modified  without  in  the  least  endangering  the 
principle  on  which  it  is  based." 

It  is  alleged  that,  while  many  pastors  are  removed  long 
before  their  resources  are  exhausted,  and  sometimes  just  at 
the  moment  of  their  widest  popularity  and  greatest  power 
for  good,  others  are  stimulated  by  the  itinerant  rule  to 
spasmodic  and  unhealthy  exertion  with  a  view  of  making 
the  most  of  their  brief  opportunity.  It  is  held  that  the 
rule  "  interferes  with  the  fullest  development  of  the  pastor- 
ate ; "  that  in  many  instances  it  induces  indolence  and 
moral  and  intellectual  atrophy ;  that  "  it  destroys  continuity 
of  work  and  dissipates  energy;"  engenders  "a  feeling  of 
unrest  among  the  membership  "  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal 


232  Ecce  Clerus 

churches,  and  a  love  of  novelty  for  its  own  sake  ;  renders 
"confidence  in  pastoral  leadership  impossible;"  keeps  pas- 
tors and  people  perpetually  strangers  to  each  other ;  gives 
no  opportunity  of  continuous  oversight  over  the  religious  life 
of  young  people  and  of  exerting  a  helpful  influence  on 
family  life;  estranges  families  from  the  Church  of  their 
choice,  and  practically  forces  very  desirable  people  outside 
the  Methodist  fold.  It  is  even  contended  that  the  wander- 
ing pastorate  militates  against  the  very  purpose  which  is  the 
principal  reason  of  its  being  namely,  "  the  successful  evan- 
gelization of  the  masses,"  because  it  "offers  no  stability  in 
pastoral  leadership  at  strategic  points  where  success  re- 
quires :  (a)  thorough,  detailed  mastery  of  local  conditions, 
possible  only  after  years  of  study  on  the  ground ;  (^)  con- 
fidence of  the  community,  coming  only  from  long  acquaint- 
ance with  man  and  work  ;  (c)  courage  on  the  part  of  the 
minister  to  enter  on  a  long  campaign,"  with  the  prospect  of 
having  "  the  opportunity  of  pushing  his  carefully  planned 
work  to  completion."  It  is  argued,  in  a  word,  that  "it 
degrades  the  pastorate  and  is  the  standing  occasion  of  a 
humiliating  exodus  of  Methodist  ministers  into  other 
denominations."  The  following  paragraphs,  quoted  by  the 
author's  permission  from  an  article  by  Dr.  Robert  Mc- 
Intyre,  one  of  the  most  popular  and  most  powerful  preach- 
ers of  the  West,  in  any  denomination,  present  the  defects 
and  disadvantages  of  the  itinerant  system  from  the  point  of 
view  of  one  who  has  had  every  opportunity  of  knowing  its 
strength  and  its  weakness.*  The  author's  apology  for  in- 
serting so  lengthy  an  extract  is  that  it  is  a  manifestly  fair 
and  forcible  putting  of  the  case  by  one  whose  loyalty  to  the 
polity  of  the  Methodist  Church  is  unquestioned  : 

•  The  representation  above  given,  which  the  present  writer  is  unable  to  indorse 
without  qualification,  contains  the  gi«t  of  the  statements  of  some  twenty  leading 
Methodist  ministers  and  laymen,  published  in  Zion's  Herald,  August  7,  1895.  In 
most  cases  I  have  used  the  ipsissitna  verba  of  those  sharing  in  the  symposium,  and 
where  that  has  not  been  done  care  has  been  taken  in  the  abridgment  to  reflect  the 
obvious  thought  of  the  writer. 


Itinerant  and  Settled  Pastorates  Compared     233 

"i.  We  are  known,"  he  says,  "as  transients,  having  no 
local  habitation,  therefore  no  local  interests.  Our  welcome 
is  a  half-hearted  one  because  we  will  not  doff  our  sandals  or 
set  away  our  staff.  We  are  pilgrims,  not  pillars ;  never  knitted 
into  but  only  stitched  on  the  spiritual  garment  of  the  city, 
and  the  basting  threads  show  through  the  first  sermon. 
Any  self-respecting  town  desires  its  pastors  to  be  drenched 
in  all  its  serious  concerns  and  baptized  with  its  peculiar 
spirit.  It  is  no  answer  to  assert  that  other  pastors  move 
as  often  as  we  do.  They  may  stay,  so  are  warmly  greeted 
and  helped.  We  must  go,  and  bear  'emigravit '  on  our  ban- 
ner, so  the  eyes  that  should  shine  on  our  approach  to  the 
gates  are  staring  with  far-away  ken  to  discern  who  is  coming 
after  us.  Thus  we  get  a  civil  nod  instead  of  a  hand-grip, 
and  are  set  farthest  from  the  fireplace  and  nearest  the  door, 
that  our  coming  and  going  may  not  disturb  the  peace  of  the 
home  people. 

"  2.  It  is  unjust  to  the  preacher.  He  can  lay  no  broad 
plans  ;  his  successor  will  upset  them.  He  dare  not  put  that 
precious  element,  his  personality,  into  his  methods,  but  only 
into  his  sermons.  If  he  has  constructive  capacity,  or 
organizing  talent,  he  does  not  develop  it.  To  do  so  would 
be  to  overturn  his  predecessor's  work,  which  done,  his  suc- 
cessor is  ready  to  overturn  his.  Men  strong  enough  to 
bring  great  enterprises  to  the  capstone  want  to  lay  founda- 
tions themselves,  or  have  assurance  that  the  plan  will  not  be 
changed  when  the  structure  is  one  story  high.  He  will  dig 
no  well,  for  the  next  may  prefer  a  hydrant.  He  plants  no 
palms,  for  the  one  rising  the  near  hill  may  delight  only  in 
terebinths.  Thus  between  the  man  of  action  and  the  man 
of  insight,  'twixt  Peter  and  John  alternating,  the  incon- 
stant church  comes  into  the  condition  of  the  perplexed  lover  : 

Who  stood  a  spell  on  one  foot  first, 

And  then  a  spell  on  t'other, 
And  on  which  of  'em  he  felt  the  worst 

He  couldn't  have  told  you  nuther. 


234  Ecce  Clerus 

"  3.  It  is  impertinence  to  God.  If  the  Spirit  calls  a  man,  it 
is  not  a  general  but  a  special  call ;  not  to  a  nebulous  but  to 
a  definite  work,  in  a  fixed  time  and  particular  place.  The 
Spirit  gives  some  men  to  the  world — as  Booth  and  Taylor; 
some  to  the  nation — as  Gough  and  Vincent ;  some  to  the 
city — as  Brooks  and  Storrs.  He  does  not  say  everywhere 
and  every  when  to  the  individual — this  he  says  to  the  Church  ; 
but  to  the  preacher  he  says  *  Now '  and  *  Here.'  How 
can  any  man  presume  to  lift  a  preacher  who  is  palpably 
fitted  for  the  place  he  fills  ?  We  are  told  that  the  Church 
has  done  good  work  under  this  rule.  Even  so.  Poe  wrote 
good  poetry  despite  his  infirmity  ;  but  it  was  his  genius,  not 
his  bottle,  that  gave  it  birth.  Not  Procrustes'  bed,  but  the 
penitents'  bench,  is  the  throne  of  Methodism. 

"Our  beloved  Church  has  gone  forward  because  of  her 
theology,  her  heroism,  and  her  hymnology.  These  three 
are  the  mighty  team  that  has  drawn  this  King's  chariot 
round  the  earth,  and  the  time  limit  has  never  been  other 
than  a  drag  on  the  wheels.  Loose  them  and  let  them  go ! 
Set  no  metes  or  bounds  to  the  Spirit's  work !  " 


The  Popular  Preacher  235 


CHAPTER  XI 
The  Popular  Preacher 

That  he  hath  wondrous  power  of  language  no  one  denieth;  he  useth 
large  words  and  many,  and  withal  hath  no  interpreter,  which  for  the  un- 
learned's  sake  is  pity  ;  yet  hath  his  heart  warm  sympathies  with  the  common- 
est of  his  kind. — Anon. 

Eloquence  is  a  divine  gift  which  to  a  certain  point  supersedes  rules,  and 
is  to  be  used  like  other  gifts  to  the  glory  of  the  Giver,  and  then  only  to  be  dis- 
countenanced when  it  forgets  its  place,  when  it  throws  into  the  shade  and 
embarrasses  the  essential  functions  of  the  Christian  preacher,  and  claims  to  be 
cultivated  for  its  own  sake,  instead  of  being  made  subordinate  and  subservient 
to  a  higher  work  and  to  sacred  objects.— ^<?A«  Henry  Cardinal  Newman. 

J.  Popular  Eloquence  not  the  Primary  Qualification  of  the  Christian 
Preacher. 

A  CAREFUL  and  thorough  analysis  of  the  elements  usually 
most  conducive  to  success  in  sacred  oratory  would  prob- 
ably result  in  surprise  and  disappointment.  "  Eloquence  is 
a  great  gift,  never  more  valuable,  perhaps,  than  in  the 
present  day  ;  overrated,  as  some  quiet-minded  philosophers 
think;  but  their  opinion  carries  no  conviction,  for  the  masses 
will  ever  follow  the  seductive  sound  of  'the  silver  tongue.' 
A  good  gift  it  is,  indeed,  but  not  perfect ;  for  it  gains  all 
the  adulation  and  most  of  the  prizes  of  life,  and  those  who 
have  it,  seeing  more  perfect  but  more  silent  wisdom  neg- 
lected, are  apt  to  imagine  that  all  the  wisdom  of  the  world 
flows  through  fluent  tongues." 

The  charm  and  fascination  of  the  orator  will  be  found 
for  the  most  part  to  be  a  gift  of  nature  rather  than  an  acqui- 
sition of  severe  moral  discipline,  on  the  one  hand,  or  the 
hard-won  prsemium  of  painstaking  intellectual  and  vocal 
culture,  on  the  other.     Of  him,  as  of  the  poet,  it  may  be 


236  Ecce  Clems 

said,  miscitur  non  Jit — he  is  born,  not  made.  But  while 
perhaps  the  majority  of  successful  speakers  are  eloquent 
mainly  by  virtue  of  natal  good  fortune  and  inherited  en- 
dowment, there  are  many  others,  and  those  of  greatest 
account,  very  often,  who  acquire  a  wide  public  influence 
only  by  dint  of  personal  labor,  character,  courage  ;  by  a 
resolution  to  succeed  in  spite  of  almost  insuperable  natural 
defects  and  difficulties.  A  pen-and-ink  sketch  by  an  admir- 
ing disciple  of  one  of  the  greatest  thinkers  and  most  interest- 
ing personalities  of  his  country  and  time — a  man  who,  though 
he  profoundly  influenced  the  religious  life,  thought,  and  liter- 
ature of  his  age,  could  scarcely  be  considered  eloquent  in 
the  commonly  accepted  sense  of  the  word,  shows  how,  be- 
fore the  spirit  and  purpose  of  the  persevering  student, 
everything  gives  way  :  "Precisely  at  11:15  a,  m.  in  shuffles 
a  little  black  Jew,  without  hat  in  hand  or  a  scrap  of  paper, 
and  strides  up  to  a  high  desk,  where  he  stands  the  whole  of 
the  time,  resting  his  elbows  upon  it,  and  never  once  opening 
his  eyes  or  looking  his  class  in  the  face — the  worst  type  of 
Jewish  physiognomy  in  point  of  intellect,  though  without 
its  cunning  or  sensuality ;  the  face  meaningless,  pale,  and 
sallow,  with  low  forehead,  and  nothing  striking  but  a  pair 
of  enormous  black  eyebrows.  The  figure  is  dressed  in  a 
dirty  brown  surtout,  blue  plush  trousers,  and  dirty  top 
boots.  It  begins  to  speak.  The  voice  is  loud  and  clear, 
and  marches  with  academic  stateliness  and  gravity,  and 
even  something  of  musical  softness  mixes  with  its  notes. 
Suddenly  the  speaker  turns  to  a  side.  It  is  to  spit,  which 
act  is  repeated  every  second  sentence.  You  now  see  in  his 
hands  a  twisted  pen,  which  is  gradually  stripped  of  every 
hair,  and  then  torn  to  pieces  in  the  course  of  his  mental 
workings.  His  feet,  too,  begin  to  turn.  The  left  pirouettes 
round  and  round,  and  at  the  close  of  an  emphatic  period 
strikes  violently  against  the  wall.  When  he  has  finished 
his  lecture  you  see  only  a  mass  of  saliva  and  the  rags  of  his 


The  Popular  Preacher  237 

pen,  Neander  is  out  of  all  sight  the  most  wonderful  being 
in  the  university."* 

How  vivid  and  powerful  the  picture  is !  And  yet  how 
utterly  inadequate  to  satisfy  the  craving  which  every 
thoughtful  student  feels,  to  know  something  of  the  personal 
charm  and  secret  of  power  not  merely  of  "  the  most  won- 
derful being  "  in  a  great  university,  but  of  one  of  the  most 
learned  and  most  luminous  teachers  of  his  age  f  —  a  living 
exemplification  of  his  own  motto — pectus  est  quod  facit  theo- 
logum — the  heart  makes  the  theologian. 

Even  in  the  case  of  the  man  whose  sustained  power  and 
world-wide  popularity  for  more  than  forty  years  have 
placed  him  as  a  star  apart  among  the  distinguished  pulpit 
luminaries  of  the  century  now  passing  into  the  "  sere  and 
yellow  leaf,"  and  made  his  name  a  household  word  in  all 
Anglo-Saxon  lands,  a  catalogue  of  those  qualities  that  most 
deeply  impressed  the  popular  mind  affords  no  clew  what- 
ever to  the  immense,  continuous,  and  far-reaching  influence 
he  wielded.  And  those  who,  like  the  present  writer,  went 
to  see  and  hear  Spurgeon  for  themselves  were  just  as  puz- 
zled to  account  for  the  crowded  thousands,  the  close  atten- 
tion, the  warm,  all-pervading  enthusiasm  in  work  and  wor- 
ship, and  the  occasional  Bochim  that  transpired  when  the 
preacher's  heart  grew  tender  and  his  voice  became  tremulous 
with  an  emotion  all  too  deep  for  tears.  "  His  voice  is  clear 
and  musical,"  says  one  who  listened  to  one  of  the  great 
preacher's  early  sermons,  "  his  language  plain,  his  style  flow- 
ing but  terse,  his  method  lucid  but  orderly,  his  matter 
sound  and  suitable,  his  tone  and  spirit  cordial,  his  remarks 
always  pithy  and  pungent,  sometimes  familiar  and  collo- 
quial, yet  never  light  or  coarse,  much  less  profane.     Judg- 


*  See  Life  of  Dr.  John  Cairns. 

t  "  Berlin  has  never  had  a  more  beloved  teacher,"  says  Dr.  Philip  Schaff.  "  His 
character  and  example  were  even  more  impressive  than  his  profound  learning  and 
original  genius.  .  .  .  He  was  one  of  the  greatest  and  best  men  I  ever  knew."— Z(/^  «/" 
Dr.  Philip  Schaff,  p.  34. 


238  Ecce  Clerus 

ing  from  a  single  sermon,  we  supposed  that  he  would 
become  a  plain,  faithful,  forcible,  and  affectionate  preacher 
of  the  Gospel  in  the  form  called  Calvinistic,  and  our  judg- 
ment was  the  more  favorable  because,  while  there  was  a 
solidity  beyond  his  years,  we  detected  little  of  the  wild  lux- 
uriance naturally  characteristic  of  very  young  preachers." 

"  The  crowds  which  have  been  drawn  to  hear  him," 
gravely  remarks  a  London  Quaker,  "  the  interest  excited 
by  his  ministry,  and  the  conflicting  opinions  expressed  in 
reference  to  his  qualifications  and  usefulness  have  been 
altogether  without  a  parallel  in  modern  times.  It  is  a  re- 
markable sight  to  see  this  round-faced  country  youth  thus 
placed  in  a  position  of  such  solemn  and  arduous  responsi- 
bility, yet  addressing  himself  to  the  fulfillment  of  its  onerous 
duties  with  a  gravity,  self-possession,  and  vigor  that  proved 
him  well  fitted  for  the  task  he  had  assumed." 

'*  His  appearance  in  the  pulpit,"  says  another  acute 
observer,  "may  be  said  to  be  interesting  rather  than  com- 
manding. .  .  .  His  figure  is  awkward,  his  manners  are 
plain,  his  face  (except  when  illumined  with  a  smile)  is 
admitted  to  be  heavy.  His  voice  seems  to  be  the  only 
personal  instrument  he  possesses  by  which  he  is  able  to 
acquire  such  marvelous  influence  over  the  minds  and  hearts 
of  his  hearers.  His  voice  is  powerful,  rich,  melodious,  and 
under  perfect  control.  Twelve  thousand  have  distinctly 
heard  every  sentence  in  the  open  air,  and  this  powerful 
instrument  carried  his  burning  words  to  an  audience  of 
twenty  thousand  gathered  in  the  Crystal  Palace." 

Before  the  majestic  voice,  dramatic  gestures,  melodious 
fluency,  and  pathetic  earnestness  of  George  Whitefield  every- 
thing went  down.  His  popular  influence  and  power  to 
enthrall  a  promiscuous  crowd  was  to  his  contemporaries  a 
marvel  before  unheard  of  in  the  history  of  preaching,  and  it 
has  never  been  repeated  since.  Ten,  twenty,  on  one  notable 
occasion  thirty  thousand  people  listened  breathless  to  his 


The  Popular  Preacher  239 

words.  The  colliers  of  Kingswood,  with  the  tears  washing 
their  way  down  their  coal-begrimed  faces,  and  the  less  emo- 
tional multitudes  assembled  on  Boston  Common,  Massachu- 
setts; skeptical  philosophers  like  David  Hume ;  fastidious 
critics  of  men  and  manners  like  Horace  Walpole ;  men  of 
the  world  like  the  suave  but  insincere  Lord  Chesterfield  ; 
astute  diplomatists  like  Benjamin  Franklin  ;  experienced 
statesmen  of  the  type  of  Bolingbroke ;  women  of  birth  and 
refinement  like  the  devout  but  imperious  Lady  Huntingdon, 
were  all  equally  powerless  to  resist  the  charms  of  the  orator 
of  the  fields.  Other  men  as  noble  in  character,  aim,  and 
purpose,  with  better  furnished  minds  and  much  weightier 
things  to  say,  counted  their  congregations  by  tens  where 
Whitefield  numbered  his  auditors  by  thousands.  As  regards 
solid  and  suggestive  thought,  the  little  finger  of  Jonathan 
Edwards  was  thicker  than  Whitefield's  loins,  but  Edwards 
never  addressed  the  crowds  that  listened  to  the  appeals 
of  his  more  gifted  and  everywhere  triumphant  friend. 

2.  Popularity  no  Infallible  Sign  of  Public  Usefulness. 

It  would  be  quite  unwarrantable  to  say  that  the  popular 
mind  is  wholly  indifferent  to  the  charms  and  insensible  of 
the  worth  of  high  moral  character  in  those  by  whom  its 
opinions  and  sentiments  are  molded  in  literature,  in  politics, 
and  in  religion,  but  it  certainly  is  not  as  quickly  responsive 
to  or  as  warmly  appreciative  of  those  grand  moral  attributes 
in  which  personal  worth  mainly  inheres  as  it  is  of  others  of 
more  showy  and  more  striking  though  less  solid  and  less 
serviceable  character.  The  public  mind  as  a  rule  is  too  pre- 
occupied or  too  hurried  in  its  intellectual  and  ethical  judg- 
ments to  carefully  distinguish  between  efforts  which  are  only 
fitted  to  produce  a  transient  impression  and  those  which 
promise  deeper  and  more  enduring  results.  Talents  which 
win  wide  attention  and  attract  the  crowd  have  no  necessary 
relation  to  the  supreme  interests  of  morality  and  religion  or 


240  Ecce  Clerus 

the  great  problem  of  human  well-being.  If  there  is  no 
necessary  antagonism,  there  certainly  is  no  essential  affin- 
ity between  distinguished  intellectual  oratorical  or  artistic 
powers  and  the  intense  moral  enthusiasm  which  exclaims, 
"  God  forbid  that  I  should  glory  save  in  the  cross  of  our 
Lord  Jesus  Christ,"  and  which  unweariedly  labors  to  hasten 
the  coming  of  the  kingdom  of  God.  An  incident  in  the  life 
of  Herr  Von  Gerok,  renowned  in  his  day  both  as  poet  and 
preacher  admirably  illustrates  the  wide  chasm  of  difference 
which  often  yawns  between  genius  consecrated  to  God  and 
brilliant  gifts  which  find  a  congenial  sphere  for  their  exer- 
cise on  the  lower  plane  of  art  and  histrionic  exhibition. 
Gerok  was  one  day  walking  along  one  of  the  principal  streets 
of  the  old  German  town  of  Stuttgart  with  an  umbrella  under 
his  arm  when  the  prima  donna  of  the  Stuttgart  Opera  troupe 
happened  to  glide  softly  past  him  on  the  sidewalk  without 
that  protection  against  the  weather.  Unexpectedly  just  at 
the  moment  the  rain  began  to  fall  and  Gerok  invited  the 
lady,  who  was  evidently  surprised  by  the  shower,  to  share 
his  shelter.  Though  entire  strangers  to  each  other,  they 
soon  disengaged  themselves  from  the  trammels  of  an  embar- 
rassing silence.  After  a  remark  or  two  about  the  weather 
the  distinguished  preacher  said,  "May  I  venture  to  ask  your 
name.''" 

"  It  is  plain  to  see  that  you  never  go  to  the  opera,"  proudly 
and  tartly  answered  the  lady.  **  Everybody  knows  that  I  am 
the  leading  singer  at  the  Court  Theater.  Now  it  is  my  turn 
to  ask  to  whom  I  am  indebted  for  the  protection  of  an 
umbrella." 

"Your  question  clearly  proves  that  you  never  go  to 
church,"  was  the  prompt  reply,  "for  all  religious  people 
know  that  I  am  chief  pastor  of  this  town." 

It  will  be  admitted  that  whatever  personal  gratification 
preacher  or  prima  donna  might  have  had  in  their  respective 
circles  of  admirers,  the  mere  fact  of  a  large  following  had  in 


The  Popular  Preacher  241 

itself  no  particular  moral  value  or  significance  in  either 
case.  The  "  religious  people  "  were  not  necessarily  pious 
because  they  admired  the  preacher  and  enjoyed  his  minis- 
trations ;  the  patrons  of  the  Court  Opera  were  not  neces- 
sarily wicked  because  they  surrendered  themselves  to  the 
charming  strains  of  the  prima  donna.  A  popular  preacher, 
a  crowded  church,  and  an  overflowing  treasury  are  in  them- 
selves no  more  an  evidence  of  evangelical  vitality,  of  spirit- 
ual prosperity  and  power,  than  a  popular  prima  donna  and  a 
crowded  theater  are  signs  of  high  moral  enthusiasm  and 
refined  histrionic  taste  among  theater-goers.  It  is  well  to 
remember  this  at  a  time  when  the  tendency  of  churches  is 
to  degenerate  into  social  clubs — associations  for  the  pro- 
motion of  literature,  amateur  art,  histrionic  culture,  or 
military  drill,  as  in  many  American  Churches,  whose  mem- 
bership, in  their  anxiety  to  loom  up  large  in  the  view  of 
the  public,  are  tempted  to  rely  on  anti-evangelical  meas- 
ures and  methods  to  replenish  their  treasury  and  attract 
the  people. 

The  question  as  to  the  extent  and  value  of  the  influence 
exerted  by  the  Christian  religion  on  the  civilization  of  any 
particular  age  would  be  very  inadequately  answered  by  a 
reference  to  the  popularity  or  otherwise  of  its  ministry.  The 
sands  of  the  centuries  are  thickly  bestrewn  with  the  wreckage 
of  gifted  men  who  were  once  borne  proudly  forward  on  the 
crest  of  the  wave  of  popular  feeling.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  reign  of  error  and  superstition  has  been  strenuously  and 
successfully  disputed,  immorality,  vice,  and  crime  have  been 
restrained,  the  battle  of  civil  and  religious  liberty  has  been 
fought  and  won,  and  the  banner  of  truth  and  justice  has 
been  unfurled  and  borne  forward  by  men  of  whom  the  world 
showed  itself  unworthy — accounting  them  "  the  filth  and 
off"scouring  of  all  things,"  and  consigning  them  to  the  gloom 
of  the  dungeon,  the  tortures  of  the  rack,  or  the  slow  agonies 
of  marturial  fires. 
16 


242  Ecce  Clerus 

Not  in  vain  Confessor  old 
Unto  us  the  tale  is  told 

Of  thy  day  of  trial. 
Every  age  on  him  who  strays 
From  its  broad  and  beaten  ways 

Pours  its  sevenfold  vial, 

Happy  he  whose  inward  ear 
Angel  comfortings  can  hear 

O'er  the  rabble's  laughter  ; 
And  while  Hatred's  fagots  bum 
Glimpses  through  the  smoke  discern 

Of  the  good  hereafter. 

Knowing  this,  that  never  yet 
Share  of  truth  was  vainly  set 

In  the  world's  wide  fallow. 
After  hands  shall  sow  the  seed, 
After  hands  from  hill  and  mead 

Reap  the  harvests  yellow. 

Thus  with  somewhat  of  the  seer 
Must  the  moral  pioneer 

From  the  future  borrow  ; 
Clothe  the  waste  with  dreams  of  grain, 
And,  on  midnight's  sky  of  rain. 

Paint  the  golden  morrow.* 

3*  Antipopular  Elements  Inhere  in  the  Essence  of  Christianity* 

In  the  attempt  to  popularize  the  Gospel  it  is  often  for- 
gotten that  antipopular  elements  inhere  in  its  very  essence ; 
that  these  unacceptable  ingredients  are  among  its  most 
prominent  and  most  essential  characteristics,  are  vital  to  its 
aim  and  purpose,  and  can  neither  be  suppressed,  slurred 
over,  nor  apologized  for  without  flagrant  dereliction  of  duty 
and  betrayal  of  sacred  trust.  Whether  it  be  the  people  of 
Nineveh,  of  Jerusalem  and  Judah,  or  of  this  modern  time 
who  are  recalled  to  duty,  a  faithful  and  unreserved  announce- 
ment of  the  divine  message  is  imperatively  required. 
"  Preach  the  preaching  that  I  bid  thee;  "  *'  Stand  in  the  court 
of  the  Lord's  house,  and  speak  unto  the  cities  of  Judah, 
which  come  to  worship  in  the  Lord's  house,  all  the  words 
that  I  command  thee  to  speak  unto  them  ;  diminish  not  a 

*  Whittier's  Barclay  <(/  Ury. 


The  Popular  Preacher  243 

word  "  (Jer.  xxvi,  2).  "  I  came,"  said  the  Peacemaker,  "  not 
to  send  peace  on  earth,  but  a  sword ;  "  "  Behold  I  send  you 
forth  as  lambs  among  wolves ;  "  "  Ye  shall  be  hated  of  all 
men  for  my  name's  sake;"  "Whosoever  shall  not  receive 
you,  nor  hear  your  words,  when  ye  depart  out  of  that  house 
or  city,  shake  off  the  dust  of  your  feet  (Matt,  x,  14.)  "  We 
know  and  are  verily  persuaded,"  wrote  Calvin,  "that  what 
we  preach  is  the  eternal  truth  of  God.  It  is  our  wish,  and  a 
very  natural  one,  that  our  ministry  might  prove  beneficial 
and  salutary  to  the  world,  but  the  measure  of  success  is  for 
God  to  give,  not  for  us  to  demand.  If  this  is  what  we  have 
deserved  at  the  hands  of  men  whom  we  have  struggled  to 
benefit,  to  be  loaded  with  calumny  and  stung  with  ingrati- 
tude, that  men  should  abandon  success  in  despair  and  hurry 
along  with  the  current  to  utter  destruction,  then  this  is  my 
voice  (I  utter  words  worthy  of  the  Christian  man,  and  let  all 
who  are  willing  to  take  their  stand  by  this  holy  profession 
subscribe  to  the  response),  'Ply  your  fagots.'  But  we 
warn  you  that  even  in  death  we  shall  become  the  con- 
querors ;  not  simply  because  we  shall  find,  even  through  the 
fagots,  a  sure  passage  to  that  upper  and  better  life,  but 
because  our  blood  will  germinate  like  precious  seed  and 
propagate  that  eternal  truth  of  God  which  is  now  so  scorn- 
fully rejected  by  the  world."  * 

It  is  safe  to  say  that  no  occupant  of  the  modern  pulpit 
will  be  long  embarrassed  by  the  popular  admiration  who 
unsparingly  declares  the  whole  counsel  of  God  and  de- 
nounces sin  in  the  concrete  as  well  as  in  the  abstract,  in 
the  individual  life  as  well  as  in  the  temper,  manners,  and 
general  conduct  of  society.  A  gifted  young  American 
preacher  in  a  prohibition  State — a  man  of  genial  spirit, 
many  personal  attractions,  and  remarkable  aptitude  for 
public  address  and  leadership,  whose  following  was  large 
and  influential,  and  whose  capacious  church  was  crowded 

♦  Necessity  of  the  Reformation. 


244  Ecce  Clerus 

Sabbath  after  Sabbath  with  people  of  many  different  de- 
nominations drawn  from  every  section  of  a  community  of 
seventy  thousand  people — was  struck  with  the  total  disre- 
gard of  the  statutory  restrictions  against  the  sale  of  liquor 
in  the  community,  and  resolved  to  urge  the  enforcement  of 
the  prohibitory  law  by  the  mayor  of  the  city.  He  accord- 
ingly preached  a  sermon  on  the  subject  to  a  crowded  audi- 
ence, which  created  quite  a  sensation.  He  interviewed  the 
mayor — one  of  the  most  capable,  most  public-spirited,  and 
most  exemplary  chief  magistrates  that  ever  honored  the 
office  in  that  city  or  any  other — presented  his  demand  and 
was  courteously  listened  to.  The  mayor  at  once  took 
action,  with  the  result  entirely  unlooked  for,  either  by  the 
mayor  or  the  minister,  that  among  a  dozen  other  persons  a 
leading  member  of  the  popular  preacher's  own  fold  was 
fined  forty  dollars  for  illicit  sale  as  a  wholesale  druggist. 
When  reminded  of  the  statement  authoritatively  formulated 
and  announced  to  the  world  by  the  official  leaders  of  his 
own  church — "  The  liquor  traffic  is  so  pernicious  in  all  its 
bearings,  so  inimical  to  the  interests  of  honest  trade,  so 
repugnant  to  the  moral  sense,  so  injurious  to  the  peace  and 
order  of  society,  so  hurtful  to  the  home,  to  the  Church,  and 
to  the  body  politic,  and  so  utterly  antagonistic  to  all  that  is 
precious  in  life,  that  the  only  proper  attitude  toward  it  for 
Christians  is  that  of  relentless  hostility.  It  can  never  be 
legalized  without  sin  " — and  asked  why  he  did  not  enforce 
the  law  of  the  Discipline  in  his  church  against  those  who 
had  been  publicly  convicted  of  its  violation,  as  he  had  very 
properly  insisted  the  mayor  should  do  in  regard  to  the  law 
of  the  State  in  the  municipality,  he  replied,  with  a  politic 
and  worldly  prudence  worthy  of  a  Machiavelli  (though  him- 
self the  most  sincere  and  honest  of  men),  "  If  anyone  cares 
to  carry  the  Discipline  to  such  extreme  lengths  and  create 
trouble  for  himself,  let  him  do  it.  I  will  not  commit  myself 
to  any  such  foolish  step." 


The  Popular  Preacher  245 

The  Demosthenes  of  the  pulpit,  though  a  roaring  lion  for 
a  sensation,  is  not  always  to  be  relied  on  for  the  steady  and 
self-sacrificing  prosecution  of  the  work  of  practical  reform. 
Yet  he  is  apt  to  look  down  calmly  and  compassionately  from 
the  lofty  and  serene  heights  on  which  his  "  gifts,  graces,"  and 
prudent  policy  have  placed  him  on  the  martyrs  to  piety, 
conviction,  and  high-minded  Christian  principle  fighting 
on  the  plain  below  him  and  wonder  why  God  should  have 
given  men  such  noble  souls,  such  effective  thinking  facul- 
ties, such  lofty  faith  and  courage,  and  so  little  tact  and 
worldly  wisdom  to  take  care  of  them  and  turn  them  to 
popular  account  and  pecuniary  advantage.  In  his  sovereign 
self-complacency  he  forgets  that  (to  quote  the  words  of 
Wordsworth,  which  the  much-maligned  Frederic  W.  Robert- 
son, of  Brighton,  used  to  cite  with  passionate  satisfaction) : 

One  single  self-approving  hour  outweighs 
Whole  years  of  stupid  starers  and  of  loud  huzzas  ; 
And  more  true  joy  Marcellus,  exiled,  feels 
Than  Caesar  with  a  senate  at  his  heels. 

The  fact  is,  the  popularity  for  which  so  many  noble- 
minded  and  godly  young  ministers  unwisely  hunger  and 
thirst  is  totally  incompatible  with  a  continuously  faithful 
administration  of  the  word  of  life.  "  Will  ye  also  go  away  ? " 
said  Christ  with  evident  surprise  and  pain  to  the  last  rap- 
idly diminishing  remnant  of  a  crowd  who  but  a  few  hours 
before  had  wished  to  take  him  and  crown  him  as  their 
king.  "  Hosanna  !  Blessed  is  he  who  cometh  in  the  name 
of  the  Lord,"  is  the  popular  cry  to-day  ;  to-morrow  the 
same  voices  shout  themselves  hoarse  with  the  strangely  dif- 
ferent demand,  "  Crucify  him,  crucify  him."  **  The  disciple 
is  not  above  his  master,  nor  the  servant  above  his  lord.  .  .  . 
If  they  have  called  the  master  of  the  house  Beelzebub,  how 
much  more  shall  they  call  them  of  his  household  "  (Matt,  x, 
24,  26).  "  Ye  received  me  as  an  angel  of  God,  even  as 
Christ  Jesus,"  are  the  words  in  which  the  apostle  recalls  the 
warmth  of  welcome  with  which  he  had  at  first  been  met  by 


246  Ecce  Clems 

a  people  to  whom  he  is  subsequently  impelled  to  address 
the  uncomplimentary  salutation,  "O  foolish  Galatians,  who 
hath  bewitched  you  ?  " 

Not  with  wreaths  of  bay,  nor  coronets  of  gold,  but  with 
crowns  of  thorns,  has  the  world  too  frequently  rewarded  its 
faithful  ministers  and  teachers  whose  feet  at  first  were 
beautiful  upon  the  mountains  to  the  fickle  multitude  to 
whom  they  published  salvation  and  seemed  for  the  moment 
to  "  bring  glad  tidings  of  good  things." 

4,  Christianity  j  Nevertheless  a  Religion  for  the  People, 

And  yet  the  religion  of  Jesus  is  manifestly  fitted  and  in- 
tended to  be  a  religion  of  the  people.  And  on  the  part  of 
the  people  there  are  not  wanting  signs  of  a  tacit  acknowledg- 
ment of  its  claims  in  that  regard.  Its  simple  announce- 
ments, "  God  so  loved  the  world,"  etc., "  God  would  have  all 
men  to  be  saved,"  etc.,  "If  any  man  thirst,  let  him  come 
unto  me,  and  drink,"  have  influenced  popular  thought  and 
feeling  in  regard  to  its  essential  character,  scope,  and  pur- 
pose and  relation  to  the  race  as  a  whole  more  deeply  than  all 
the  creeds,  theologies,  and  theories  of  the  atonement  of 
Christendom  put  together,  whether  Augustinian  or  Pelagian, 
Calvinistic,  Arminian,  or  Socinian.  And  if  the  Christian 
preacher  has  no  liberty  to  alter  the  substance  and  tenor  of 
the  divine  message  or  tone  down  its  solemn  admonitions 
against  sin,  there  is  at  least  promised  and  pledged  to  him  a 
heavenly  power  sufficient  to  clothe  its  very  terrors  with  an 
attractive  sublimity  and  grandeur  and  make  its  sternest 
claim  acceptable  to  thoughtful  and  worthy  souls.  On  the 
hard  wayside,  on  the  rocky  ledge,  and  among  the  thorns 
much  of  the  precious  seed  he  sows  will  be  sure  to  fall,  but 
sufficient  will  drop  on  the  more  promising  soil  of  "  good  and 
honest  hearts"  to  reward  his  toil,  bringing  forth  thirty,  sixty, 
and  even  a  hundredfold.  "  He  that  goeth  forth  and  weep- 
eth,  bearing  precious  seed,  shall  doubtless  come  again  with 


The  Popular  Preacher  247 

rejoicing,  bringing  his  sheaves  with  him."  "  Even  the  dark 
and  solemn  theme  of  corruption,"  says  Dr.  Shedd,  "ex- 
pounded by  one  who  has  been  instructed  out  of  the  written 
revelation  and  the  thronging,  bursting  consciousness  of  his 
own  soul — even  this  sorrowful  and  abstractly  repellent  theme, 
when  enunciated  in  a  genuinely  biblical  manner,  fascinates 
the  natural  man  himself  like  the  serpent's  eye.  .  .  .  And 
still  more  is  this  true  of  that  other  and  antithetic  doctrine 
of  the  divine  mercy  in  the  blood  of  the  God-man.  This 
string  may  be  struck  with  the  ple.ctrum  year  after  year,  cen- 
tury after  century,  and  its  vibration  is  ever  resonant  and 
thrilling,  yet  sweet  and  seolian,"  * 

The  people  will  never  endure  the  doom  of  unforgiven  sin 
and  of  sinners  announced  by  one  who  has  never  felt  the  in- 
cidence of  the  penalty  in  his  own  soul,  and  the  pangs  and  bitter 
questionings  of  an  awakened  and  troubled  conscience.  But 
to  one  who  like  Paul  has  been  impelled  to  cry,  "  O  wretched 
man  that  I  am !  who  shall  deliver  me  out  of  the  body  of 
this  death  ?  "  or  who  like  Bunyan  preaches  to  others  what  he 
himself  "  has  smartingly  felt,"  or  like  Charles  G.  Finney  knows 
by  bitter  personal  experience  the  intolerable  weight  of  the 
soul's  unlifted  load,  or  like  Spurgeon  has  been  driven  by 
the  storm  of  the  mind  to  seek  shelter  in  the  harbor  of  di- 
vine mercy  at  the  first  opportunity,  "  the  poor,  the  maimed, 
the  lame,  the  blind,"  will  come  as  to  a  feast  prepared,  and 
many  will  be  led  to  abandon  the  error  of  their  ways.  The 
Christian  Gospel  in  and  of  itself  has  never  been  unpopular 
and  never  will  be  in  its  proper  constituency.  And  those 
who  preach  it  with  wisdom,  tenderness,  earnestness,  and 
power  will  never  want  an  audience.  But  he  who  conveys 
his  message  to  the  people  as  men  carry  a  dead  man  to  the 
grave — gently,  quietly,  solemnly,  decorously,  and  with  as 
little  stir  as  possible — ought  not  to  be  surprised  if  he  and 
his  few  friends  are  largely  left  to  bury  the  corpse  alone. 

♦  Homiletics  and  Pastoral  Theology,  p.  33. 


248  Ecce  Clerus 

5.  Elements  of  Power. 

The  elements  of  a  real  power  and  a  serviceable  popularity 
in  the  pulpit  are  not  beyond  the  reach  of  any  man  who  is 
truly  called  of  God  to  preach  and  is  willing  to  submit  to 
the  inexorable  law  of  spiritual  elevation  and  achievement. 
The  noblest  efforts  of  the  human  soul  in  any  department  of 
activity — in  art,  science,  handicraft,  philosophy,  poetry, 
eloquence — are  always  responses  to  the  appeals  of  things 
higher  and  grander  than  itself.  In  painting,  sculpture,  music, 
literature,  there  is  no  upward  movement  without  the  tacit 
recognition  of  an  ideal.  And  if  in  all  the  higher  realms  of 
human  endeavor  a  dominating  ideal  is  essential  to  a  true 
and  sustained  inspiration,  can  it  be  less  so  in  religion,  the 
highest  realm  of  all  ?  The  man  who  by  his  word  would  lift 
men  above  their  ordinary  plane  of  thought,  purpose,  and 
attainment  must  himself  be  lifted  by  the  word  of  God. 
Power  over  others  comes  by  obedience  to  the  best  and 
truest  in  oneself,  "Rule  thyself,  thou  rulest  all,"  was  the 
favorite  maxim  of  the  Greeks.  Shepherds  of  the  people  in 
the  noble  sense  that  Agamemnon  was  one  (' Ay aj^f/zvova  ttoi- 
fiiva  Xcubv)  are  few ;  but  when  they  appear  the  best  and 
bravest  are  willing  to  obey  them.  The  great  orators  of 
Christian  history — the  Chrysostoms,  Athanasiuses,  Augus- 
tines,  Savonarolas,  Calvins,  Bossuets,  Massillons,  Wesleys, 
Whitefields,  Beechers,  Spurgeons,  Simpsons,  Durbins,  Fin- 
neys — the  men  who  nobly  succeeded  where  others  signally 
failed,  have  been  men  mighty  in  the  word  of  God  and  richly 
invested  with  his  Spirit's  power.  They  drank  like  men 
athirst  at  the  fountain  of  divine  inspiration.  They  had  a 
whole-souled  faith  in  God's  revealed  will,  and  being  them- 
selves fully  convinced  that  the  Gospel  they  preached  was  able 
to  make  men  "wise  unto  salvation,"  they  bore  that  conviction 
in  upon  other  minds.  They  loved,  studied,  understood, 
wept,  prayed  over,  and  preached  the  everlasting  word.  And 
what  in  other  hands  was  feeble  became  in  theirs  "a  ham- 


The  Popular  Preacher  249 

mer  to  break  the  rock  in  pieces  "  (Jer,  xxiii,  29),  Here,  as 
in  other  things,  the  secret  of  great  achievement  is  the  man 
that  wields  the  tool.  "  Show  me,"  demanded  Omar,  "  the 
sword  with  which  you  have  fought  so  many  battles  and  slain 
so  many  thousands  of  infidels."  Amrou  unsheathed  his 
scimitar,  and  to  the  caliph's  ejaculation  of  surprise  and  con- 
tempt at  its  common  appearance  made  reply,  "  Alas  !  the 
sword  itself  without  the  arm  of  its  master  is  neither 
sharper  nor  more  weighty  than  the  sword  of  Farezdak  the 
poet."  * 

Dr.  Shedd  has  the  authority  of  the  brightest  eras  in  the 
history  of  the  Christian  pulpit  for  saying,  "  If  sacred  elo- 
quence is  to  maintain  its  past  commanding  position  in 
human  history,  and  is  to  exert  a  paramount  influence  upon 
human  destiny,  it  must  breathe  in  and  breathe  out  from 
every  pore  and  particle  the  living  afflatus  of  inspiration. 
By  this  breath  of  life  it  must  live.  If  the  utterances  of  the 
pulpit  are  to  be  fresh,  spiritual,  and  commanding,  the  sacred 
orator  must  be  an  exegete.  Every  discourse  must  be  the 
elongation  of  a  text."f 

The  word  of  God  calls  for  faith — faith  in  the  lofty  things 
of  God.  And  faith  in  the  revealed  word,  particularly  in  Him 
who  is  himself  the  eternal  Word — the  embodiment  of  all 
our  best  ideals,  the  fulfillment  of  our  highest  hopes — gives 
the  sublimity  and  charm  of  personal  holiness,  the  courage  of 
conviction,  and  the  accent  and  emphasis  of  authority.  It 
begets,  too,  a  sense  of  utter  dependence  on  God  and  of 
utter  independence  of  mammon,  the  great  enslaver  and  cor- 
rupter of  gifted  and  ingenuous  souls  in  every  age,  and  never 
more  than  in  the  present.  It  puts  the  preacher  near  the 
popular  heart — the  great  weary  soul  of  humanity,  with  its 
doubts  and  fears,  sins  and  sorrows,  its  craving  for  affection, 

♦  Mills's  History  of  Mohammedanism,  p.  73.  Farezdak  was  a  poet  famous  for  his 
fine  description  of  a  sword,  but  not  equally  famous  for  his  use  of  one.  (Pocock's  note  in 
Carmen  Tograi,  p.  184.) 

+  Homiletics  and  Pastoral  Theology. 


250  Ecce  Clems 

sympathy,  and  fellowship.  It  gives  him  the  infinite  human 
yearning  that  made  Lord  Shaftesbury  so  popular  with  the 
poor  of  London,  leading  him  to  begrudge  himself  even  the 
victory  over  death  and  the  glorious  rewards  of  eternity  so 
long  as  there  were  human  wrongs  to  redress  and  sorrows 
and  miseries  to  relieve,  and  forcing  from  him  the  pathetic 
murmur,  in  his  last  moments,  "  How  can  I  die  and  leave  all 
this  unrelieved  misery  behind  ? " 


The  Minister  in  Authority  251 


CHAPTER  XII 
The  Minister  in  Atithor ity 

Do  ye,  as  elders  of  the  Church,  adorn  with  disciphne  the  bride  of  Christ — 
and  by  the  bride  of  Christ  I  mean  the  whole  assembly  of  the  Church — in 
moral  purity ;  for  if  she  be  found  pure  by  the  bridegroom  King,  she  herself 
will  attain  the  height  of  honor,  and  ye,  as  guests  at  the  marriage  feast,  will 
gain  great  delights ;  but  if  she  be  found  to  have  sinned,  she  herself  will  be  cast 
out,  and  ye  will  suffer  punishment  because,  it  may  be,  the  sin  has  happened 
through  your  neglect. —  Clementine  Epist.  Clem,  ad  Jacob. 

J.  No  Divinely  Authorized  Form  of  Ecclesiastical  Polity. 

By  his  able  and  scholarly  discussion  of  the  organization  of 
the  early  Christian  Churches  the  Bampton  lecturer  of  1880 
created  something  akin  to  a  sensation  among  Roman  Cath- 
olic and  Anglican  Churchmen,  Employing  a  method  of 
investigation  "which  deals  with  the  facts  of  history  by  proc- 
esses analogous  to  those  which  have  been  applied  with  sur- 
passing success  to  the  phenomena  of  the  physical  world,  and 
which  have  there  vindicated  their  accuracy  as  methods  of 
research  by  proving  to  be  methods  of  discovery,"*  he  found 
it  necessary  to  cross-plow  an  old  and  well-trodden  path, 
and  disturb  one  of  the  most  fundamental  and  most  familiar 
of  Catholic  traditions — the  hoary  and  venerable  figment  of 
the  divine  origin  and  the  unbroken  succession  from  apos- 
tolic times  of  the  order  and  polity  of  the  so-called  Catholic 
episcopate.  It  was  a  bold  thing  for  a  clergyman  of  the 
English  National  Church  and  the  occupant  of  an  important 
position  in  her  oldest  university  to  question  what  almost  all 
her  most  distinguished  theologians  and  Church  historians 
had  regarded  as  an  unassailable  article  of  faith. f     But  the 

*  Hatch's  Organization  of  the  Early  Christian  Churches,  p.2. 
+  Dr.  Lightfoot,  late  Bishop  of  Durham,  is  a  marked  exception  to  the  general  rule. 
See  his  essay  "  Christian  Ministry  "  in  his  Commentary  on  the  Epistle  to  the  Philippians, 


252  Ecce  Clerus 

claims  of  truth  are  ever  paramount  with  candid  and  cultured 
minds.  With  the  calm  dignity  of  conviction  and  the  schol- 
arly confidence  which  is  conscious  of  being  sustained  by 
indisputable  facts  Dr.  Hatch  affirms  his  position  at  the  out- 
set, and  by  an  almost  overwhelming  array  of  proof  drawn 
from  sources  mainly  contemporaneous  with  the  facts  attested 
proceeds  to  make  it  good.  "  But  when,"  says  he  "  we  descend 
from  poetry  to  fact,  from  the  dreams  of  inspired  and  saintly 
dreamers  to  the  life  of  incident  and  circumstance  which 
history  records  and  in  which  we  ordinarily  dwell,  then,  if 
the  evidence  shows,  as  I  believe  it  to  show,  that  not  only  did 
the  elements  of  the  Christian  societies  exist,  but  that  also 
the  forces  which  welded  them  together  and  gave  them  shape 
are  adequately  explained  by  existing  forces  of  human  soci- 
ety, the  argument  from  analogy  becomes  so  strong  that,  in  the 
absence  of  positive  proof  to  the  contrary,  it  is  impossible  to 
resist  the  inference  that  in  the  divine  economy  which  gov- 
erns human  life,  as  it  governs  the  courses  of  the  stars,  by  the 
fewest  causes  and  the  simplest  means,  the  Christian  societies 
and  the  confederation  of  those  societies  which  we  commonly 
speak  of  in  a  single  phrase  as  '  the  Visible  Church  of  Christ ' 
were  formed  without  any  special  interposition  of  that  mys- 
terious and  extraordinary  action  of  the  divine  volition  which, 
for  want  of  a  better  term,  we  speak  of  as  'supernatural.'" 
Defining  his  position  further,  he  says,  "  It  may  be — nor  is  it 
a  derogation  from  its  grandeur  to  say  that  it  was — out  of 
antecedent,  and,  if  you  will,  lower  forms,  out  of  existing 
elements  of  human  institutions  by  the  action  of  existing 
forces  of  human  society,  swayed  as  you  will  by  the  breath- 
ing of  the  divine  breath,  controlled  as  you  will  by  the 
Providence  which  holds  in  its  hand  the  wayward  wills  of 
men  no  less  than  the  courses  of  the  stars,  but  still,  out  of 
elements  and  by  the  action  of  forces  analogous  to  those 
which  have  resulted  in  other  institutions  of  society  and  other 
forms  of  government,  came  into  being  that  widest  and  strong- 


The  Minister  in  Authority  253 

est  and  most  enduring  of  institutions  which  bears  the  sacred 
name  of  the  Holy  Catholic  Church.  The  divinity  which 
clings  to  it  is  the  divinity  of  order.  It  takes  its  place  in  that 
infinite  series  of  phenomena  of  which  we  ourselves  are  a 
part.  It  is  not  outside  the  universe  of  law,  but  within  it. 
It  is  divine  as  the  solar  system  is  divine,  because  both  the 
one  and  the  other  are  expressions  and  results  of  those  vast 
laws  of  the  divine  economy  by  which  the  physical  and  the 
moral  world  alike  move  their  movement  and  live  their  life."  * 

2,  Early  Christian  Leaders  Indifferent  as  to  Names,  Titles,  and  Specific 
Forms  of  Ecclesiastical  Authority. 

But  though  the  unprejudiced  reader  feels  himself  obliged 
to  acknowledge  the  force  of  an  argument  remarkable  for  its 
cogency  and  clearness,  he  is  at  the  same  time  unable  to 
suppress  a  sense  of  something  lacking.  He  cannot  under- 
stand why  from  first  to  last  no  reference  whatever  is  made 
to  the  distinctive  Christian  doctrine  of  authority  as  stated 
by  Christ  and  propounded  and  exemplified  by  his  apostles, 
all  the  more  as  the  omission  is  a  fatal  one  and  vitiates  the 
author's  whole  conclusion.  It  may  be  urged  that  Dr.  Hatch 
is  not  concerned  with  the  spirit  and  method  of  ecclesiastical 
authority,but  only  with  the  genesis  and  growth  of  its  historical 
forms  and  institutions.  But  the  former  is  really  the  vital  and 
all-important  question,  compared  with  which  the  latter  is  of 
little  practical  account.  And  it  was  hardly  to  be  anticipated 
that  a  religion  whose  leading  characteristic  is  its  intense 
inwardness  and  spirituality  would  assign  an  undue  impor- 
tance to  external  forms — to  matters  of  polity  and  order,  ter- 
minology and  title.  Christianity  is  never  an  innovator  for 
innovation's  sake.  Its  mission  is  one  not  of  destruction  or 
supersession,  but  of  conservation  and  fulfillment.  In  its 
work  of  renewal  and  reformation,  whether  of  the  individual 
man,  of  society,  of  morals,  politics,  or  methods  of  govern- 

♦  Hatch's  Organization  of  the  Early  Christian  Churches,  pp.  i8, 19. 


254  Ecce  Clems 

raent,  it  proceeds  from  within  outward,  not  from  the  outside 
inward.  And  it  was  surely  no  more  wonderful  that  the  vis- 
ible body  of  Christ  in  the  world  should  adopt  the  names, 
forms,  and  functions  of  approved  contemporary  magistra- 
cies and  governments  for  its  various  organizations  and  insti- 
tutions, as  Dr.  Hatch  insists  was  the  case,  than  it  was  that 
men  whose  rule  of  life  was  "  not  to  be  conformed  to  this 
world,"  but  "  transformed  by  the  renewal  of  their  minds," 
should  yet  live  as  denizens  of  earth  and  express  the  new 
and  divine  life  within  them — their  faith,  hope,  love  ;  their 
peace,  joy,  and  consolation,  not  in  some  celestial  tongue, 
but  in  the  terms  of  a  world  they  had  professedly  abandoned 
and  renounced  as  being  destitute  of  sympathy  with  their 
peculiar  aims  and  a  total  stranger  to  their  sublime  expe- 
riences, hopes,  and  aspirations.  Having  made  its  adherents 
in  all  their  ruling  ideas,  principles,  pursuits,  and  purposes 
citizens  of  heaven,*  Christianity  is  no  more  concerned  as 
to  the  particular  name  or  nature  of  the  earthly  authority  they 
may  choose  to  institute  and  obey,  whether  in  Church  or 
State,  than  it  is  concerned  about  the  skies  under  which  they 
live,  the  clothes  they  wear,  or  the  architectural  style  and 
character  of  the  homes  they  inhabit. 

The  early  Christian  communities  manifested  no  anxiety 
to  find  hints  in  the  words  of  Jesus  as  to  the  particular  form 
of  ecclesiastical  government  they  should  establish. 

Though  he  twice  used  the  word  "  Church  "  {kKKXijala,  as- 
sembly) as  a  fitting  designation  for  the  gathering  of  his 
people,  the  Christian  congregations  in  Palestine  for  a 
long  time  retained  the  old  Jewish  nomenclature  for  their 
assemblies  and  called  them  synagogues  {avvayuyyai).  And 
it  remained  for  the  extra-Palestinian  communities — Greek, 
Roman,  and  Hellenist — to  whom  Christ  himself  had  no  per- 
sonal mission,  to  give  currency,  supremacy,  and  a  fixed  sig- 
nificance to  the  word  ecclesia. 

*  fiiujrv  yap  to  no^uTevfia  kv  ovpavolg  vnapxei  (Phil,  iii,  20). 


The  Minister  in  Authority  255 

Again,  Christ  called  his  followers  disciples  {fiadrjTai)  ; 
but  that  authoritative  and  strikingly  significant  and  appro- 
priate designation  was  soon  to  be  completely  superseded 
by  a  nickname — an  originally  meaningless  though  now  uni- 
versally accepted  and  honored  epithet.  Not  from  the  lips 
of  Christ,  but  from  an  unfriendly  and  scornful  Syrian  com- 
munity ;  not  from  the  land  of  its  h'rf/i,  but  from  the  wider 
world  of  its  destiny^  was  the  Christian  Church  to  receive  the 
name  by  which  its  members  were  to  be  everywhere  known 
to  the  end  of  time.  The  rabbins  of  the  Palestinian  schools, 
probably  hoping  to  confine  a  hated  sect  within  an  abomi- 
nated province  and  preserve  Judea  and  Jerusalem  from  the 
stain  and  scandal  of  the  new  religious  movement,  named 
the  companions  of  the  Lord  Nazarenes  or  Galileans,  but 
these  provincial  designations,  inaccurate  in  their  application 
and  narrow  in  their  scope,  were  quietly  allowed  to  drop. 
The  scurrilous  wits  of  the  Syrian  metropolis  made  a  luckier 
hit ;  they  called  the  objects  of  their  scorn  and  contempt 
Christians  (XgiOTiavoi)*  and  the  mud  stain  struck  deep  and 
became  indelible.  The  opprobrious  epithet,  exalted  and 
transfigured  in  the  light  of  history  and  by  the  lapse  of  cen- 
turies, remains.  Nor  is  at  all  likely  that  religious  people 
would  be  any  wiser,  purer,  more  exemplary,  or  more  happy 
if  known  as  disables  or  by  other  more  frequent  epithets  of  the 
apostolic  age,  such  as  believers  {ol  maTol),  brethren  {ol 
d(JeA0ot),  saints  {ol  ayioi),  names  far  more  definitely  and 
happily  indicative  of  their  calling,  character,  and  relations 
— rather  than  as  Christians.  In  the  same  way  it  was  a  mat- 
ter of  absolute  indifference  to  the  apostles  whether  the  lead- 
ers of  local  Christian  communities,  in  their  day,  were  called 
presbyters  or  bishops.f     The  same  standard  of  qualification, 

*  Acts  xi,  26.  In  only  two  other  places  does  the  word  "  Christian  "  occur  in  the  New 
Testament  (Acts  xxvi,  28  and  i  Pet.  iv,  16),  and  in  each  place  it  seems  to  be  used  as  a 
term  of  opprobrium.  In  the  thirteen  epistles  of  St.  Paul  h  does  not  occur  once,  and  yet 
it  must  have  been  familiar  to  him  as  a  nickname,  for  it  is  his  traveling  companion, 
Luke,  who  first  calls  attention  to  its  use  at  Antioch. 

t  This  is  clear  from  such  passages  as  i  Tim.  iii,  1-5 ;  v.  i,  17.     Tit.  i,  5-8. 


256  Ecce  Clems 

character,  and  conduct  applied  to  both.     The  terms  are  in- 
terchangeable.    The  duties  and  functions  were  the  same. 

3.  The  New  Testament  Doctrine  of  Authority, 

But  if  the  Founder  of  the  Christian  Church  and  his 
apostles  left  its  organization  and  government  in  an  inchoate 
and  indeterminate  condition — to  be  molded  by  time  and  by 
local  needs  and  circumstances  under  the  controlling  hand 
of  Providence,  the  example  of  secular  governments,  the  cur- 
rent sentiment  of  the  age,  and  the  growing  experience  of 
godly  men — they  have  not  been  similarly  indifferent  as  to  the 
spirit  and  manner  in  which  the  place  of  authority  is  to  be 
occupied,  its  responsibilities  sustained,  and  its  duties  and 
functions  discharged.  Here,  where  their  teaching  was  fore- 
seen to  be  vital  to  the  purity,  peace,  and  well-being  of  the 
Church  in  every  land  and  age,  their  statements  are  full,  clear, 
definite,  and  decisive.  That  teaching  may  be  briefly  sum- 
marized as  follows  : 

1.  They  show  that  the  faculty  for  spiritual  government  is 
a  gift  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  not  bestowed  by  him  indiscrimi- 
nately and  at  random  on  every  aspirant  to  place  and  power, 
but  distributed  like  the  gifts  of  teaching,  prophesying, 
miracle-working,  healing,  knowledge  and  interpretation  of 
tongues  to  whomsoever  he  will.*  "  Blessed  art  thou,  Simon 
Bar-jona,"  said  Jesus,  warmly,  in  recognizing  Peter's  pri- 
macy in  the  apostolate,  *^  for  flesh  and  blood  hath  not  revealed 
«V  (the  Messiahship  and  divinity  of  the  Christ)  unto  thee,  but 
my  Father  which  is  in  heaven.  And  I  also  say  unto  thee,  that 
thou  art  Peter,  and  upon  this  rock  (Trerpa)  I  will  build  my 
Church.f 

2.  The  essential  qualifications  for  the  exercise  of  author- 
ity in  the  Church  are  personal  goodness,  an  unblemished 
reputation,  spiritual  insight  and  sagacity,  the  possession  in  a 
special  degree  of  virtues  common,  in  varying  measure,  to  all 

*  X  Cor.  xii,  II,  28;  Eph.  iv,  11,  t  Matt,  xvi,  17. 


The  Minister  in  Authority  257 

the  members  of  the  Christian  brotherhood — "  the  wisdom  of 
the  serpent  and  the  harmlessness  of  the  dove."  Upon  these 
leading  requisites  special  stress  is  laid  in  the  injunction 
given  by  the  apostles  to  the  Church  when  selection  is  to  be 
made  of  the  members  of  the  first  Christian  diaconate.  "  But, 
brethren,  look  ye  out  from  among  you  seven  men  oi good  re- 
port, full  of  the  Spirit  and  of  wisdom,  whom  we  may  appoint 
over  this  business."  *  So  indispensable,  indeed,  are  these 
marks  of  fitness  for  the  functions  of  the  spiritual  rectorate 
held  to  be  that  when  the  first  of  the  apostles — the  holder  of 
the  kingdom's  keys — yields  to  motives  and  impulses  below 
the  lofty  plane  of  Christian  rectitude,  and  blindly  stumbles 
on  a  policy  of  compromise  with  the  spirit  of  prejudice  and 
error,  his  authority  is  at  once  challenged  and  set  aside  and 
his  fault  publicly  rebuked  by  one  whose  spiritual  vision  is 
clearer  and  more  accurate  than  his  own.  f 

3.  The  power  of  authority  is  a  responsibility  imposed  by 
God  only  on  those  by  whom  it  is  unsought,  unexpected, 
and  usually  undesired.  The  attitude  of  our  Lord  toward 
mistaken  aspirants  is  typical,  and  was  meant  to  be  extended 
to  all  similar  cases  in  all  time.  To  the  mother  of  James 
and  John,  craving  priority  and  distinction  in  the  adminis- 
tration of  the  kingdom  for  her  two  sons,  his  answer  was: 
"Ye  know  not  what  ye  ask.  .  .  .  To  sit  on  my  right  hand, 
and  on  my  left,  is  not  mine  to  give,  but  it  is  for  them  for 
whom  it  hath  been  prepared  by  my  Father."J  It  was  the 
special  sin  and  condemnation  of  Diotrephes  (thought  by 
some  to  have  been  a  bishop)  that  "  he  loved  to  have  the 
preeminence,"§  and  the  indelible  brand  of  infamy  on  the 
memory  of  Simon  Magus  is  that  he  was  willing  to  purchase 
the  gift  of  God  with  money  as  many  have  in  vain  attempted 
to  do  since  his  day. 

4.  The  ends  for  which  authority  in  the  Church  exists  are 
purely  and   exclusively  altruistic.     The  whole   spirit   and 

♦  Acts  vi,  3.  t  Gal.  ii,  ii,  %  Matt,  xx.  23,  23.  §  3  John  9. 

17 


258  Ecce  Clerus 

aim  of  Christianity  are  a  rebuke  of  the  one  crying  sin  of 
worldly  power,  namely,  its  selfishness  displayed  in  varying 
but  congenial  forms,  as  pride,  self-will,  self-importance, 
self-seeking,  disregard  of  the  rights  of  the  poor,  the  weak, 
the  disinherited,  the  defenseless.  Jesus  came  to  make  a 
nobler  and  tenderer  heart  beat  beneath  the  vestments  and 
insignia  of  authority.  He  called  attention  to  the  moral 
grandeur  of  self-denial  and  self-effacement*  He  spoke  of 
the  beauty  of  social  modesty,  of  the  blessedness  of  hum- 
blest service,  of  the  indisputable  primacy  and  preeminence 
of  those  who,  though  entitled  to  sit  among  the  first  and 
greatest,  are  yet  content  to  take  the  lowest  places,  f  For 
him  the  Christian  spirit  is  willing  to  rule  only  for  the  sake 
of  the  service  it  can  render.  Commenting  on  the  bold  re- 
quest of  "  the  mother  of  the  sons  of  Zebedee  "  which  had 
stirred  the  indignation  of  their  ten  fellow-apostles,  he  said: 
"Ye  know  that  the  rulers  of  the  Gentiles  lord  it  over  them, 
and  their  great  ones  exercise  authority  over  them.  Not  so  is 
it  among  you:  but  whosoever  would  become  great  among 
you  shall  be  your  servant  (diaKovog) ;  and  whosoever  would 
be  first  among  you  shall  be  your  bondslave  (dovXog) :  even 
as  the  Son  of  man  came  not  to  be  ministered  unto,  but  to 
minister,  and  to  give  his  life  a  ransom  for  many."J 

There  was  no  enormity  the  apostle  Peter  was  more 
anxious  the  elders  of  the  Churches  of  the  Dispersion 
should  avoid  than  that  of  over-ruVmg  God's  heritage. §  Nor 
was  there  any  personal  virtue  of  which  the  apostle  Paul 
was  more  sensitively  jealous  than  of  his  absolute  disinter- 
estedness in  the  service  of  the  Church.  "But  I  call  God 
for  a  witness  upon  my  soul,  that  to  spare  you  I  forbare  to 
come  unto  Corinth.     Not  that  we  have  lordship  over  your 

*  Matt,  xxiii,  12.  t  Luke  xiv,  9. 

i  Matt.  XX,  25-28.  In  these  striking  words  Christ  completely  ignoresthe  incident 
that  gave  rise  to  them  as  an  abnormity  and  contradiction  powerless  to  interrupt  the 
operation  of  the  kingdom's  law.  It  is  as  if  he  had  said,  "  This  is  the  order  now  insti- 
tuted and  existing  amone  you,  and  never  to  be  changed,  namely, '  Whosoever  would 
become  great  among  you,      etc.  §  Pet.  ii. 


The  Minister  in  Authority  259 

faith,  but  are  helpers  of  your  joy."  *  Expressing  near  the 
close  of  the  same  epistle  his  joyful  readiness  to  spend  and 
be  spent  for  the  souls  of  his  Corinthian  friends,  he  asks: 
"  Did  I  take  advantage  of  you  by  any  one  of  them  whom  I 
have  sent  unto  you?  I  exhorted  Titus,  and  I  sent  the 
brother  with  him.  Did  Titus  take  any  advantage  of  you  ? 
Walked  we  not  in  the  same  spirit  ?  in  the  same  steps  ?  "  and 
then  closes  with  an  avowal  of  his  disinclination  to  "  deal 
sharply  "  with  the  Corinthian  delinquents,  but  rather  to  use 
"the  authority  which  the  Lord  gave"  hira  "for  building 
up  and  not  for  casting  down."f 

It  is  clear  that  if  the  leaders  of  the  Church  in  succeeding 
times  had  kept  these  obvious  facts  and  principles  steadily 
in  sight,  her  dominion  and  influence  in  the  world  would 
have  been  far  more  widely  extended  than  they  are  to-day, 
and  her  record  through  the  ages  would  have  been  very  dif- 
ferent. Instead  of  staining  her  annals  with  scenes  of  un- 
seemly contention,  of  barbaric  pomp,  of  diabolic  intrigue 
and  ruthless  despotism ;  with  tales  of  blood  and  slaughter, 
of  marturial  fires,  of  fiendish  torture,  imprisonment,  and 
exile  of  the  innocent  and  the  just,  her  story  might  have 
been  an  unbroken  recital  of  aggressive  enterprise,  of  moral 
and  spiritual  conquests  won  by  wise  and  beneficent  govern- 
ment, exemplary  citizenship,  saintly  sufferings,  generous 
sacrifice,  and  heroic  toil.  "  The  light  of  the  moon  "  in  her 
cloudless  sky  might  have  been  "  as  the  light  of  the  sun," 
and  the  light  of  her  sun  might  have  been  "  sevenfold." 

4.  Forms  of  the  Embodiment  of  Authority  in  Apostolic  and  Sub- 
apostolic  Times, 

There  is  hardly  anything  more  interesting  in  the  life  of 
the  early  Church  than  the  determined  effort  on  the  part  of 
the  apostles  to  secure  permanent  recognition  of  the  lofty 
ideal  of  authority  the  Lord  had  set  before  them,  in  spite  of 

♦  2  Cor.  i,  23,  24.  t  a  Cor,  xii,  17,  18;  xiii,  10. 


260  Ecce  Clems 

the  painful  consciousness  which  they  appear  to  have 
shared  in  common,  and  which  they  make  no  attempt  to 
conceal,  of  the  utter  hopelessness  of  the  struggle  in  their 
own  age  at  least  and  for  some  time  after,*  Content  to  in- 
trust the  Churches  they  had  labored  and  suffered  to  found 
to  the  most  general  and  vaguest  outline  of  a  system  of 
ministry,  authority,  and  government,  as  if  purposely  pro- 
viding liberty  and  scope  for  different  ages  and  diverse 
peoples  and  varying  sets  of  circumstances  to  adapt  it  and 
mold  it  into  definite  shape  to  meet  their  own  specific 
needs,f  they  never  weary  of  placing  in  bold  and  striking 
relief  the  leading  moral  and  spiritual  features  of  the  Chris- 
tian rectorate,J  laying  special  emphasis  on  the  intrinsic 
blessedness  of  ministering  § — the  honor  of  an  oversight 
which  always  and  essentially  means  moral  exemplification 
and  spiritual  leadership,  personal  primacy  in  all  the  gifts 
and  graces  of  the  Spirit,  and  the  virtues  of  a  self-denying, 
aggressive,  and  all-victorious  faith.  The  orders  instituted 
and  the  titles  chosen  plainly  disclose  the  underlying  motive 
and  the  controlling  aim  and  purpose.  The  nomenclature  is 
old  and  familiar,  but  it  acquires  a  new  and  deeper  meaning 
as  applied  to  persons,  offices,  functions,  solemnly  set  apart 
to  the  glory  of  God  in  the  relief  of  man's  temporal  need 

•  2  Thess.  ii,  2.  Wliatever  interpretation  may  be  put  upon  the  "  mystery  of  iniq- 
uity "  and  "  man  of  sin,"  it  clearly  refers  to  an  authority  in  the  Christian  Church  op- 
posed in  spirit  and  purpose  to  the  authority  of  God.  The  apostle's  admonitory  words 
in  parting  with  the  Ephesian  elders  are  full  of  vivid  foreboding  (Acts  xx,  29  ;  see  also 
2  Tim.  iv,  3 ;  Tit.  i,  11 ;  2  Pet.  ii,  i  ;  Jude ;  3  John  9). 

+  "  The  whole  condition  of  the  Churches  was  plastic ;  apostles  and  prophets  are 
placed  side  by  side  with  teachers,  powers,  helps,  governments  (i  Cor.  xii,  28).  What- 
ever actual  offices  may  have  existed,  they  are  regarded  by  St.  Paul  rather  according  to 
the  general  effect  which  they  in  common  with  others  might  produce  upon  the  life  of 
the  Church  as  permanent  orders.  Out  of  them  all  emerge  in  the  time  of  the  pastoral 
epistles  the  two  offices  of  deacons  and  presbyters.  Later  on  (perhaps  some  thirty  or 
forty  years  after)  we  find  the  episcopal  office  rising  to  preeminence  above  the  presby- 
terate.  ...  It  is  sufficient  to  note  that  the  episcopate,  like  the  other  offices,  was  due 
not  to  any  formal  appointment  which  it  would  be  impious  to  alter,  but  to  providential 
necessity,  and  that  a  similar  necessity  has  constantly  changed  its  form.  .  .  .  The 
Church  ...  is  not  bound  to  any  one  type,  but  has  power  to  adapt  its  institutions  to 
the  needs  of  mankind  and  its  own  position  in  the  world." — The  World  as  the  Subject 
of  Redemption,  Freemantle,  p.  112.  See  also  Hatch's  Organization  of  the  Early 
Christian  Churches,  lecture  i,  and  Lightfoot's  Christian  ministry. 

\  2  Tim.  iv,  i-s  ;  ii,  22 ;  Tit.  i,  6;  i  Tim.  iii,  1-13 ;  i  Pet.  v,  1-3. 

%  Paul's  favorite  words  are  "  minister"  and  "  ministering." 


The  Minister  in  Authority  261 

and  the  edification  and  wardship  of  his  soul.  Pagan  com- 
munities amid  which  the  early  Christian  Churches  were 
planted  had  been  familiar,  for  example,  with  the  name  and 
office  of  deacon  (ScdKovog)  long  before  the  word  was  whis- 
pered or  the  institution  dreamed  of  among  the  obscure  little 
groups  of  Christians,  but  never  before  had  it  been  em- 
ployed to  connote  and  cover  so  much  of  moral  wealth  and 
worth  and  such  keen  and  tender  sympathy  with  human 
distress  and  suffering  ;  and  never  before  had  it  required 
such  a  rare  combination  of  ethical  and  intellectual  qualities 
to  fit  men  for  its  delicate  functions.  Similarly  men  had 
long  been  accustomed  to  intrust  their  municipal,  state,  and 
religious  affairs  to  presbyters  (oi  TrpeojSvTegoi) ,  as  in  the 
case  of  the  Jews ;  to  men  having  the  well-seasoned  experi- 
ence of  age,  or  to  gifted  minds  capable  of  wise  and  safe 
counsels  at  an  earlier  period  of  life  {oi  yegovaioi),  as  in  the 
case  of  the  Greeks;  to  senators,  as  with  the  Romans;  to 
aldermen,  as  with  the  Saxons ;  but  they  never  dreamed  of 
demanding  that  the  years  which  gave  the  position  its 
specific  character  and  distinctive  title  should  carry  into  the 
office  such  a  blending  of  mature  wisdom  and  goodness  as 
the  early  Church  required  of  her  chosen  counselors  and 
rulers.  The  word  episcopos,  used  interchangeably  with/r<fj- 
byteros*  and  referring  always  in  the  apostolic  writings  to  the 
same  ministerial  rank  and  order,  though  in  a  slightly  dif- 
ferent aspect,  was  a  common  designation  of  a  well-known 
and  honored  civil  functionary — an  officer  of  administration 
and  finance,  an  overseer  of  a  temple,  a  dispenser  of  chari- 
table funds — ^but  it  never  suggested  the  all-providing  good- 
ness and  watchful  care  of  God  as  it  did  when  it  came  to 
be  applied  to  the  presbyter  who  was  chosen  from  among 
his  brethren  as  almoner  alike  of  God's  spiritual  and  tem- 
poral bounty,  distributing  in  almost  every  town  and  village 

*  The  admissions  of  both  mediaeval  and  modern  writers  of  almost  all  schools  of  theo- 
logical opinion  have  practically  removed  this  from  the  list  of  disputed  questions.— 
Hatch's  Organization  of  the  Early  Christian  Churches^  p.  39. 


262  Ecce  Clerus 

the  thank-offering  of  the  Church  to  relieve  the  necessities 
of  widows,  orphans,  and  the  poor — presiding  as  God's  rep- 
resentative at  the  great  altar  {dvaiaarijpiov)  of  human  need, 
while  at  the  same  time  dispensing  the  word  of  truth  and 
wisdom  for  the  comfort,  quickening,  and  upbuilding  of 
men's  souls.  "  The  glory  of  a  bishop,"  says  St.  Jerome,  in 
one  of  his  epistles,  "is  to  relieve  the  poverty  of  the  poor." 
And  many  of  them  acquitted  themselves  so  praiseworthily 
in  this  delicate  and  difficult  function  that  their  memories 
were  cherished  with  gratitude  and  affection  long  after  they 
had  passed  away.  The  epitaph  of  one  represents  him  as 
saying,  "  My  solicitude  was  this  :  to  clothe  the  naked  who 
came  to  me,  to  freely  bestow  upon  the  poor  whatever  the 
circling  year  did  yield."*  Of  St.  Tetricus  of  Dijon  an  in- 
scription records,  "Thou  wast  the  food  of  the  destitute, 
wast  a  guardian  of  widows,  didst  assume  the  care  of  minors, 
wast  altogether  a  shepherd  in  every  duty."f  Of  a  bishop 
of  Gaeta  another  inscription  says,  *'  Courteous  to  strangers, 
he  bestowed  his  very  self  upon  the  indigent ;  those  he  satis- 
fied with  pleasing  talk,  these  with  generous  aid."  J 

"O  Eligus,"  the  bereaved  people  are  represented  as  ex- 
claiming at  the  funeral  of  another,  "thou  delight  of  the 
poor,  thou  strength  of  the  frail,  thou  protector,  and  only 
less  than  divine  comforter  of  the  needy,  who  after  thee  will 
give  liberal  alms  as  thou  hast  done.?  or  who  will  be  our  de- 
fender, good  shepherd,  as  thou  hast  been.?  "§ 

"It  was  as  becoming  thus,"  says  Dr.  Hatch,  "the  center 
around  which  the  vast  and  growing  system  of  Christian  char- 
ity revolved  that  his  function  [the  presiding  presbyter's]  of 

*  HsEC  mihi  cura  fuit  nudos  vestire  petentes.  Fundere  pauperibus  quidquid  con- 
cesserat  annus. — De  Rossi's  BulUtino  di  Archeologia  Christiana,  p.  55. 

t  Esca  in  opum,  tutor  vtduarum,  cura  minorum,  Omnibus  officiis  omnia  pastor  eras. — 
Le  Blanks  Inscriptions  Chretiennes  de  la  Gaule. 

X  Hospitibus  gratus  se  ipsum  donavit  egenis.  Illosque  eloquio  hos  satiavit  ope. — 
Mommsen's  Inscriptiones  Regni  Neopolitani. 

§"0  Eligi,  dulcedo  tu  pauperum,  fortitudo  debilium,  protector  et  impar  egentium 
consolator ;  quis  post  te  eleemosynara  sicut  tu  dabit  largam :  vel  quis  nostri  erit  pro- 
tector sicut,  tu  bone  pastor  ?  "—K/V*  5".  Elig.y  vol.  ii,  p.  25. 


The  Minister  in  Authority  263 

administration  overshadowed  his  function  as  presbyter,  and 
the  name  of  the  latter  fell  gradually  into  disuse."*  The 
apostles  had  deemed  the  exercise  of  "  prayer  and  the 
ministry  of  the  word  "  the  noblest  part  of  the  service  of 
God,  and  they  definitely  determined  to  give  themselves 
exclusively  to  this.  But  it  requires  a  strong  and  vivid  faith 
and  an  intensely  spiritual  imagination  to  perceive  the 
superior  glory  of  spiritual  service,  and  this  faith  and  this 
refined  imaginative  faculty  have  not  always  been  shared  in 
an  eminent  or  even  in  an  equal  degree  by  those  called  to 
the  ministry  of  salvation.  A  preference  for  limited  au- 
thority and  prominence  early  took  the  place  of  the  older 
and  wiser  preference  for  unlimited  spiritual  influence  and 
power ;  and  a  desire  to  rule  men  supplanted  the  far  nobler 
longing  to  save,  illumine,  console,  and  edify  them.  "The 
gift  of  ruling,  like  Aaron's  rod,  seemed  to  swallow  up  the 
other  gifts." 

5.  Abuse  of  Power. 

It  is  very  evident  that  bfetween  the  simple  form  of  presby- 
teral  and  episcopal  rule  in  apostolic  and  subapostolic  times 
and  the  highly  organized  ecclesiastical  monarchies  with 
which  the  Church  later  became  familiar  there  is  only  the 
remotest  resemblance.  In  fact,  scarcely  anything  remains 
to  identify  them  but  the  name.  The  careful  student  of  early 
Church  history  is,  even  now,  at  a  loss  to  account  for  the  com- 
plete change  which,  in  a  brief  period  of  less  than  forty  years, 
was  effected  from  the  joint  and  coordinate  control  of  pres- 
byters under  the  presidency  and  leadership  of  ^l primus  inter 
pares  in  the  apostolic  age  to  a  widely  established  episcopal 
regime  in  the  opening  years  of  the  second  century.  Even 
the  earliest  post-apostolic  writing,  the  letter  of  Clement, 
Bishop  of  Rome  f  (circa,  A.  D.  90),  to  the  disorderly  Corin- 

*  Organization  of  the  Early  Christian  Churches. 

t  Clem.  Rom.  ad  Corinthios.    Gebhardt  and  Hamack,  Patrum  Apostolicorum  Opera. 


264  Ecce  Clerus 

thian  Church,  though  expressly  dealing  with  the  question  of 
discipline  and  government,  makes  no  mention  of  or  allusion 
to  an  episcopate  in  that  Church.  Clement  appeals  to  the 
entire  body  of  believers,  and  asks  them  to  restore  their 
presbyters  just  as  the  apostle  Paul  had  earlier  appealed  to 
the  same  Church  as  a  whole,  insisting  on  their  maintaining 
and  enforcing  the  principles  of  a  wholesome  Christian 
discipline. 

The  spirit  of  assumption  once  encouraged  grew  apace. 
For  its  early  triumphs  and  rapid  spread  it  was  largely  in- 
debted to  Ignatius  of  Antioch,  whose  deep,  almost  seraphic 
devotion  and  lofty  ideal  of  official  character  and  duty  make 
him  at  once  the  most  imperious  and  most  impressive  per- 
sonality of  his  age.*  It  is  not  difficult  to  conceive  how  very 
different  must  have  been  the  character  and  tone  of  the 
Christian  ministry  in  more  than  half  of  modern  Christen- 
dom, and  how  very  different  must  have  been  the  entire 
current  of  ecclesiastical  history  if  the  Syrian  bishop  had 
been  permitted  to  die  a  natural  death  among  his  beloved 
fellow-presbyters  and  people  in  the  goodly  city  of  the 
Orontes  instead  of  having  the  opportunity  of  posing  as  an 
exultant  candidate  for  marturial  honors  in  the  metropolis  of 
the  empire.  It  is  certain  that  few  events  of  the  first  five 
centuries  exerted  a  profounder  influence  on  the  fortunes  of 
the  Church  than  the  martyrdom  of  St.  Ignatius.  His  letters 
addressed  to  various  churches  on  his  way  to  Rome  (and 
there  is  no  need  to  doubt  the  authenticity  of  the  shorter 
Greek  recension)  contain  the  deadly  germs  of  more  than 
half  the  practical  as  distinct  from  the  speculative,  of  more 
than  half  the  internal  as  distinct  from  the  external,  evils 
from  which  the  Church  has  suffered.  But  for  these  effu- 
sions and  their  unwarrantable  episcopal  pretensions  and 
claims  the  world  would  probably  never  have  heard  of  the 

*  In  his  letter  to  Polycarp  the  martyr  Bishop  of  Antioch  styles  himself  'IjTdriOf 
b  KoX  Qeo<j>6po(, 


The  Minister  in  Authority  265 

apostolic  origin  and  divine  authority  of  the  episcopate.  To 
make  room  for  the  bishop  of  the  Ignatian  letters  the  mys- 
tical body  of  Christ — the  Bride  of  the  Lamb — has  been 
ruthlessly  deprived,  one  by  one,  of  her  most  distinctive 
rights  and  privileges.  Fascinated  and  stimulated  by  the 
totally  anti-apostolic  and  antichristian  conception  of  a 
bishop  who  takes  the  place  of  God  and  of  Christ  in  the 
Church,  the  ministry  of  brothers  among  their  brethren — 
their  equals — slowly  developed  into  a  hierarchy,  over- 
shadowing the  Church  and  arrogating  to  itself  a  large  part 
of  the  common  inheritance  of  the  people  of  God.  The 
"liberty  of  prophesying,"  which  was  shared,  as  is  clear 
from  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  and  from  the  epistles  of  St. 
Paul,  by  the  whole  membership  of  the  Church,  irrespective  of 
sex,  was  restrained.  The  right  to  baptize,  to  administer  the 
sacrament  of  the  Lord's  Supper,  to  actively  participate  in 
the  discipline  of  the  Christian  community,  was  taken  away, 
and  finally  it  was  assumed  that  the  bishop,  whom  heaven 
had  invested  with  the  power  of  the  apostles  in  the  bestow- 
ment  of  spiritual  gifts,  was  the  sole  and  exclusive  channel 
through  whom  the  Spirit  of  God  was  pleased  to  descend  into 
the  souls  "either  of  individual  Christians  at  baptism  or  con- 
firmation, or  of  church  officers  at  ordination.* 

The  whole  conception  of  the  Christian  Church  and  min- 
istry underwent  radical  and  essential  change,  though  not 
without  protest,  and  at  length  the  foundations  were  laid  for 

*  "  Little  by  little  those  members  of  the  Christian  Churches  who  did  not  hold  office 
■were  excluded  from  the  performance  of  almost  all  ecclesiastical  functions.  At  first  a 
layman  might  not  preach  if  a  bishop  were  present,  and  then  not  if  any  church  officer 
were  present,  and  finally  not  at  all.  At  first  a  layman  brought  his  own  gifts  to  the 
altar  and  communicated  there ;  and  then  he  could  only— unless  he  were  an  emperor- 
stand  outside  the  dais  upon  which  the  officers  stood  ;  and  finally,  in  the  Kast,  he  might 
not  even  see  the  celebration  of  '  the  mysteries.'  ...  By  the  force  of  changing  circum- 
stances and  by  the  growth  of  new  conceptions  the  original  diff'erence  of  rank  and  order 
became  a  difference  of  spiritual  power  ;  and  a  mediaeval  theologian  writing  of  the  same 
officer  whom  Justin  Martyr  describes  simply  as  a  president,  offering  prayers  and 
thanksgiving  in  which  the  congregation  take  their  part  by  the  utterance  of  the  solemn 
Amen  r  says  that "  the  orders  of  the  heavenly  host,  although  they  enjoy  beatitude  and 


says 
wan 

d-„ , 

Early  Christian  Churches,  p.  128, 


.ant  nothing  to  the  sum  of  felicity,  still  revere  the  glory  of  a  priest,  wonder  at  his 
ignity,  yield  to  him  in  privilege,  honor  his  power.'  "—Hatch  s  Organization  of  the 


266  Ecce  Clerus 

the  oppressive,  ruthless,  and  wasteful  tyranny  of  the  mediaeval 
papacy;  and  pretexts  were  provided  for  the  less  excusable 
attempts  to  force  the  consciences  of  men  and  exercise  lord- 
ship over  God's  heritage  in  later  and  more  enlightened 
times.  The  love  of  power  is  an  essentially  earthly  passion, 
and  ever  resorts  to  earthly  means  to  obtain  its  objects.  With 
the  extension  of  the  Church's  spiritual  dominion  there  has 
grown  the  tendency  to  grasp  the  sword  of  temporal  power.* 
A  prelate's  hold  of  heaven  may  be  illusory  and  unreal,  and 
if  only  he  can  securely  retain  the  honors,  emoluments,  pomp, 
and  prestige  of  office,  he  is  usually  content  to  let  the 
rest  go.  Not  so  with  his  earthly  authority  and  prerogative. 
He  leaves  no  means  unemployed  to  make  these  as  real  and 
effective  as  possible.  If  he  cannot  save  men's  souls  from 
error  by  acts  of  kindness  and  arguments  of  truth  and  love, 
he  can  at  least  starve,  torture,  mutilate,  imprison,  exile,  or 
burn  their  bodies.  And  to  this  his  last  argument  he  has  not 
hesitated  to  resort.  He  has  never  scrupled,  either  as  Cath- 
olic or  Protestant,  Arian  or  Orthodox,  Calvinist  or  Quaker, 
to  use  force  to  coerce  the  soul  where  he  could  do  so  under 
legal  forms  and  with  impunity.  H.  T.  Buckle,  author  of  the 
History  of  Civilization,  held  that  genuine  religious  beliefs 
that  firmly  grip  men's  souls  necessarily  impel  them  to  perse- 
cute in  one  way  or  another  those  who  do  not  share  their 
convictions.  And  certainly  intense  faith,  unaccompanied 
by  an  intenser  benevolence  of  heart,  and  armed  with  power 
to  enforce  its  peculiar  dogmas,  has  uniformly  played  this 
role.  The  inconsiderateness,  harshness,  and  cruelty  which 
so  often  mark  the  footsteps  of  authority  in  the  annals  of  the 
Church  present  the  most  violent  contrast  to  the  proverbial 

♦Even  so  sagacious  and  careful  an  historian  as  Ranke  sees  some  excuse  for  this. 
"  There  was,"  he  says,  speaking  of  the  empire  of  Henry  III  of  Germany,  "  a  princi- 
ple inherent  in  the  ecclesiastical  constitution  which  opposed  itself  to  a  secular  influ- 
ence so  widely  extended,  and  this  would  inevitably  make  itself  felt  should  the  Church 
become  strong  enough  to  bring  it  into  effectual  action.  There  is  also,  as  it  appears  to 
me,  an  inconsistency  in  the  fact  that  the  pope  should  exercise  on  all  sides  the  supreme 
spiritual  power  and  yet  -remain  himself  subjected  to  the  emperor." — History  of  the 
Popes,  vol.  1.  p.  20,  Bohn's  edition. 


The  Minister  in  Authority  267 

"meekness  and  gentleness  of  Christ."  The  honest  fisher- 
man who  stood  at  the  head  of  the  apostolate  coveted  nothing 
more  than  the  defensive  armor  of  a  clear  head,  a  pure  heart, 
and  a  good  conscience,  and  contented  himself  with  exhort- 
ing those  over  whom  he  had  any  influence  to  be  similarly 
provided.*  Later  Peters,  claiming  direct  spiritual  descent 
from  him  of  Capernaum,  have  been  less  single-minded,  pre- 
senting startling  proof  how  far  divergence  from  an  original 
type  may  proceed  without  attracting  special  attention  or 
awakening  in  those  most  immediately  concerned  the  remot- 
est consciousness  of  the  ever-widening  gulf  of  difference. 
The  apostle  John  can  only  complain  to  his  well-beloved 
Gains  of  the  malicious  prating  and  high-handed  despotism 
in  the  Church  of  Diotrephes,  but  Cardinal  Richelieu  puts 
St,  Cyran,  the  friend  of  his  youth,  and  the  most  glorious  of 
contemporary  saints,  whom  he  can  neither  cajole  nor  ter- 
rify, in  prison,  while  he  himself  spends  a  considerable  por-- 
tion  of  his  time  with  the  dissolute  grandees  of  the  court  at 
the  comedy  in  the  Royal  Theater.f  St.  Paul  in  writing  to 
Timothy  complains  that  "  Alexander  the  coppersmith"  did 
him  "much  evil."  What  would  he  have  said  could  he  have 
been  told  that  in  the  very  city  where  he  wrote,  after  more 
than  fourteen  centuries  of  active  Christian  effort  to  convert 
the  world  to  God,  an  Alexander  claiming  to  be  shepherd  of 
the  universal  fold  would  be  guilty  many  times  over  of 
nearly  all  the  sins  and  crimes  condemned  in  the  Deca- 
logue ?X     Polycarp,  "  the  blessed  and  apostolic  presbyter," 

*  I  Pet.  iii,  14,  15. 

+  The  famous  John  of  Werth  was  a  fellow-captive  with  the  Abbot  of  St.  Cyran  in 
their  common  prison  of  Vincennes.  Brought  from  his  confinement  to  witness  the 
sumptuous  representation  of  Richelieu's  comedy  of  "  Miriamne  "  before  the  king  and 
court,  he  was  invited  to  express  his  opinion  of  the  spectacle.     He  replied  that  it  was 


magnificent,  but  what  astonished  him  most  was  to  find  in  "the  most  Christian  king- 
dom the  bishops  at  the  comedy  and  the  saints  in  prison." — R.  Lodge's  Richelieu,  p.  20. 
X  See  Roscoe's  Life  0/  Leo  X.  Gibbon,  in  his  Antiquitiesof_  the  House  of  Bruns- 
•wick,  speaks  of  Pope  Alexander  VI  as  "  the  Tiberius  of  Christian  Rome,"  and  of  his 
bastard  daughter  Lucretia  as  the  offspring  of  "  a  sanguinary  and  incestuous  race."  See 
Roscoe's  Dis.,  on  the  character  of  Lucretia  Borgia.  "  The  great  object  of  Alexander 
through  his  whole  life,"  says  Ranke,  "was  to  gratifjr  his  inclination  for  pleasure,  his 
ambition,  and  his  love  of  ease."     In  attempting  to  poison  another  he  took  his  own  life. 


268  Ecce  Clems 

as  Irenseus  names  him,  is  satisfied  to  rebuke  the  arch-heretic 
Marcion  as  the  firstborn  of  Satan  {npcjTOTOKog  tov  larava) 
in  the  public  streets  of  Rome,  but  Calvin,  with  the  civil  power 
of  Geneva  behind  him,  sends  Servetus  to  the  flames.  The 
man  whose  name  has  conferred  the  greatest  moral  and  intel- 
lectual splendor  on  the  historic  see  of  Alexandria  submits  to 
be  driven  from  his  people  by  a  popular  heretical  presbyter  of 
his  own  diocese  and  favorite  of  the  imperial  court.  Arch- 
bishop Laud,  on  the  other  hand,  puts  the  refractory  Puritan 
clergy  of  his  time  to  all  kinds  of  pains,  penalties,  and  embar- 
rassments,* citing  them  before  the  high  commission,  scold- 
ing and  suspending  them,  expelling  them  from  their  cures 
for  "Gospel-preaching,"  and  giving  them  certain  indelible 
marks  of  his  affection  for  their  souls  in  sundry  mutilations 
of  the  organs  of  the  face.f  Chrysostom  dies  in  exile,  exult- 
ing in  the  presence  of  the  Comforter.  Cardinal  Wolsey, 
parasite,  tool,  and  attorney  of  a  lustful  and  imperious  king, 
dies  brokenhearted,  bewailing  his  fidelity  to  an  unworthy 
master  and  his  infidelity  to  God.  J  Leo  I  resists,  with  hands 
uplifted  in  devout  deprecation,  the  rage  of  the  barbarian 
Attila§  and  his  hordes,  as  Raphael  has  nobly  pictured  him; 
a  later  and  more  martial  wearer  of  the  pallium,  scorning  the 
ethereal  and  ghostly  weapon  of  Leo,  keeps  the  proud  scion 
of  the  House  of  Hapsburg,  Henry  IV,  shivering  in  his  pen- 
itential shirt  at  the  gate  of  Matilda's  impregnable  fortress  of 
Canossa  through  cold  days  and  frosty  nights,  piteously 
imploring  the  forgiveness  of  his  sins  and  the  gift  of  his  he- 
reditary crown,  II  The  first  of  the  Gregories,  with  true  Christ- 
like compassion  for  sheep  outside  the  fold,  "  scattered  abroad 


*"  The  great  obstacle  in  his  way  was  the  Puritanism  of  nine  tenths  of  the  English 
people,  and  on  Puritanism  he  made  war  without  mercy." — Grttn's  History  of  tht 
English  People,  vol.  iii,  p.  158. 

t  Green's  History  0/  England y  vol.  iii,  p.  167. 

Xlbid.,  vol.  ii,  p.  150. 

§  Sheppard,  Fall  of  Rome  and  Rise  of  the  Nationalitiu, 

I  Stephen's  essays,  Hildebrand. 


The  Minister  in  Authority  269 

without  a  shepherd,"  sends  Augustine  with  forty  compan- 
ions to  evangelize  the  paganism  of  Britain.*  More  than  a 
thousand  years  after  a  degenerate  and  unworthy  occupant 
of  the  same  ecclesiastical  throne  gloats,  with  a  satisfaction 
worthy  of  the  devil  himself,  over  the  blood  and  misery  of 
massacred  Christians — men,  women,  and  helpless  little 
children.  When  his  shameless  correspondent,  Catherine 
de'  Medici,  jubilantly  informed  the  pope  of  the  slaughter, 
in  cold  blood,  of  seventy  thousand  Huguenots  on  the  fatal 
2oth  of  August,  1572,  the  heartless  hireling  thought  it  a 
fit  occasion  for  a  stately  exhibition  of  public  rejoicing. 
"  Innocent  III  went  in  solemn  procession  to  render 
thanks  for  the  victory  vouchsafed  over  his  enemies,  and 
struck  medals  in  honor  of  the  deed,"  says  the  historian 
White,f  and  then  asks,  "  Has  that  medal  been  yet  thrown 
out  of  the  collection  of  the  Vatican  and  broken  to  pieces  by 
the  hangman's  ax  ? "  The  apostolic  rule  demands  of  the 
episcopos  "a  spirit  and  attitude  of  gentleness  unto  all  men, 
aptness  to  teach,  and  patience,"t  but  when  Paul  IV  asked 
CarafFa,  the  founderofthe  Order  of  the  Theatins,  "what  rem- 
edy could  be  devised  "  for  the  doctrinal  disputes  to  which 
the  Reformation  had  given  rise  in  Italy,  Spain,  Germany, 
and  other  countries,  the  fierce  and  gloomy  cardinal  replied 
with  a  proposition  which  justly  entitles  him  to  the  unenviable 
distinction  of  having  been  the  inventor  of  the  most  ruthless 
engine  of  spiritual  tyranny  and  oppression  known  to  history. 
The  manuscript  life  of  this  man  who,  armed  with  the  papal 
bull,  published  July  21,  1542,  gave  all  his  time,  energy,  and 
fortune  to  efforts  "  to  suppress  and  uproot  the  errors  that 
have  found  place  in  the  Christian  community,  permitting 
no  vestige  of  them  to  remain,"  gives  the  following  rules  as 
drawn  up  by  Caraffa  himself,  and  as  being  "  the  best  he 
could  devise  for  promoting  the  end  in  view  :  " 

*  Green's  History  of  the  English  People,  vol.  i,  p.  40. 

t  White's  History  0/  France^  p.  276.  %  2  Tim.  ii,  24  ;  1  Tim.  iii,  3. 


270  Ecce  Clerus 

"  First.  When  the  faith  is  in  question  there  must  be  no 
delay,  but  at  the  slightest  suspicion  rigorous  measures  must 
be  resorted  to  with  all  speed. 

"  Secondly.  No  consideration  to  be  shown  to  any  prince 
or  prelate,  however  high  his  station. 

"Thirdly.  Extreme  severity  is  rather  to  be  exercised 
against  those  who  attempt  to  shield  themselves  under  the 
protection  of  any  potentate ;  only  he  who  makes  plenary 
confession  shall  be  treated  with  gentleness  and  fatherly  com- 
passion. 

"  Fourthly.  No  man  must  debase  himself  by  showing  tol- 
eration toward  heretics  of  any  kind,  above  all  toward  Cal- 
vinists."  * 

The  terror  spread  like  a  plague.  The  rancor  of  contend- 
ing factions  aided  the  sinister  designs  of  the  inquisitors,  and 
men  of  differing  views  became  each  other's  bloodthirsty 
accusers  before  the  dread  tribunal.  "I  tore  myself  from  all 
those  false  pretensions,"  said  the  learned  and  renowned 
Peter  Martyr  Vermigli,  "  and  saved  my  life  from  the  danger 
impending."  "  Scarcely  is  it  possible,"  mournfully  exclaims 
Antonio  dei  Pagliarici,  "to  be  a  Christian  and  die  quietly  in 
one's  bed."  Not  inaptly  does  the  historian  of  his  order  f  de- 
scribe the  melancholy  pause  of  Bernardino  Ochinoon  reach- 
ing the  summit  of  Mount  Bernard :  "  When,  looking  once  more 
back  on  his  beautiful  Italy,  he  recalls  the  honors  he  had  re- 
ceived there;  the  countless  multitudes  by  whom  he  had 
been  eagerly  received  and  respectfully  listened  to,  and  who 
afterward  conducted  him  with  reverential  admiration  to  his 
abode ;  certainly  no  man  loses  so  much  as  an  orator  in  losing 
his  country  ;  yet  was  he  leaving  it,  and  that  when  far  ad- 
vanced in  years.  Up  to  this  moment  he  had  retained  the 
seal  of  his  order;  this  he  now  resigned  to  his  companion 
and  then  turned  his  steps  toward  Geneva."  Even  books 
were  subjected  to  careful  and  thorough  examination  as  be- 

♦  Ranke's  History  o/the  Popes ^  vol.  i,  p.  159.       t  Boverio's  Annali,  vol.  i,  p.  438. 


The  Minister  in  Authority  271 

ing  suspected  of  teaching  pestilent  heresy.  "  In  the  year 
1543  Caraffa  decreed  that  no  book,  whether  new  or  old, 
and  whatever  its  contents,  should  for  the  future  be  printed 
without  permission  from  the  inquisitors.  Booksellers  were 
enjoined  to  send  in  a  catalogue  of  their  stock  and  to  sell 
nothing  without  their  assent.  The  officers  of  customs  also 
received  orders  to  deliver  no  package,  whether  of  printed 
books  or  manuscripts,  to  its  address  without  first  laying  them 
before  the  Inquisition."  * 

And  this  relentless,  sleepless,  deathless  spirit  of  ecclesias- 
tical despotism  is  the  only  one  which  remains  unalterably 
pagan — the  same  after  Christian  baptism  and  the  assump- 
tion of  the  Christian  name  as  before.  The  traditional  Peter 
learns  nothing.  Theology  is  a  mummy  in  his  keeping. 
History  and  its  facts  and  lessons  are  an  impertinence.  His- 
torical criticism  and  investigation  of  his  pretensions  make 
no  more  impression  on  him  than  is  made  by  the  flying 
sparks  of  the  anvil  on  the  blacksmith's  dog  lying  upon  the 
smithy  floor.  Science  lights  its  torches  round  him  only  to 
make  him  the  more  resolutely  close  his  eyes.  Adversity 
and  misfortune  leave  him  unsubdued,  unmollified.  To  the 
claims  of  advancing  truth  and  freedom  he  pays  no  heed. 
The  most  solemn  and  imperative  moral  obligations  are 
often  with  him  trifles  to  be  played  with.  The  charms  of 
saintly  heroism,  purity,  and  devotion  never  seem  to  touch 
his  heart.  Art,  literature,  philosophy,  music,  poetry,  elo- 
quence, have  often  been  pressed  into  his  service  only  to 
sacrifice,  after  a  time,  their  freedom,  freshness,  vigor,  leav- 
ing his  spirit  unelevated,  unsoftened,  by  their  noble  minis- 
tries, his  purpose  unchanged,  his  policy  and  methods  un- 
modified. The  Ethiopian  cannot  change  his  skin,  nor  the 
leopard  his  spots.  Within  the  recollection  of  living  men  he 
has  proclaimed  himself  infallible  ex  cathedra,  and  lost  a  short 
time  after,  through  the  sheer  shortsightedness  of  the  pro- 

♦  Ranke's  History  of  the  Popes^  vol.  i,  p.  i6o, 


272  Ecce  Clerus 

ceeding,  never  again  to  recover  it,  the  last  remnant  of  his 
temporal  sovereignty.  We  have  seen  his  authority  openly 
confronted  and  defied  on  free  American  soil  by  one  of  the 
most  virile,  fearless,  and  popular  of  demagogues  and  char- 
latans, and  after  many  months  of  apparent  impotence  on 
Peter's  part  we  have  seen  the  rebel  and  maligner  subdued, 
reduced  to  silence,  relegated  to  obscurity,  and  brought  in 
an  attitude  of  childlike  penitence  to  plead  for  mercy  and 
pardon  at  Peter's  feet.*  More  recently  yet  we  have  seen 
him  sternly  deny  the  validity  of  non-Catholic  ministerial 
orders — both  those  of  Rome-aping  Anglicans  and  those  of 
more  independent  and  uncompromising  Protestant  churches 
— and  waving  aside  the  solemn  overtures  and  depreca- 
tions of  one  of  the  oldest  and  greatest  of  modern  statesmen 
recently  passed  away  amid  the  regrets  of  mourning  millions 
of  the  English-speaking  peoples.  And  later,  still  resolutely 
bent  on  checking  the  liberaHzing  tendencies  of  American 
Catholicism  at  its  social,  intellectual,  political,  and  hierarchal 
headquarters,  his  mailed  hand  has  fallen  with  such  weight, 
force,  and  suddenness  on  leading  dignitaries  of  the  Cath- 
olic communion  in  the  United  States  as  to  make  them  liter- 
ally *'  tremble "  beneath  its  blow.  Even  to-day  eminent 
sons  of  the  Church,  like  Gibbons,  Ireland,  and  Keane,  are  not 
left  unaware  of  the  sharpness  and  sleeplessness  of  the  sword 
whose  hilt  is  at  Rome,  but  whose  point  penetrates  every- 
where. 

But  still  more  to  be  deprecated  is  the  hurtful  influence 
exerted  by  the  Roman  see  on  the  social  and  intellectual 


*  "  In  the  first  centuries,  as  soon  as  the  pope  had  been  made  a  temporal  sovereign  by 
the  King  of  the  Franks,^  almost  immediately,  as  if  Christ  had  stood  there  saying,  '  My 
word  shall  not  be  gainsaid,'  that  Roman  see  fell  into  the  depths  of  infamy."  "  The 
Roman  see  for  a  generation  or  two  was  the  gift  actually  of  bad  women."  "  He  [the 
present  pope]  is  selling  out  the  people  everywhere  to  gain  strength  for  his  diplomatic 
reserves."  And  to-day  the  present  dear  old  holy  father  actually  thinks  that  the  res- 
toration of  the  temporal  power  is  the  one  thing  that  should  be  done  for  the  hastening 
of  the  kingdom  of  God,  that  rotten  old  temporal  throne  that  the  providence  of  God  has 
blasted  and  blighted  and  cursed." — Extracts  from  Dr.  McGlynn's  sermon  in  Cooper 
Union,  New  York.  Compare  Dr.  McGlynn's  article  in  The  Forum  on  his  visit  to  the 
pope,  where  a  very  different  tone  is  adopted. 


The  Minister  in  Authority  273 

life  and  political  fortunes  of  modern  nations.  Ireland  is  a 
conspicuous  case  in  point.  Of  late  years  no  people  esteem- 
ing it  a  privilege  to  share  the  sheltering  wing  of  Rome  has 
attracted  the  attention  of  the  world  more  than  the  Irish 
people.  Struggling  to  advance  from  their  low  and  obscure 
place  in  the  rear  of  modern  nations,  there  has  been  cher- 
ished in  the  Irish  breast  a  laudable  ambition  to  taste  the 
sweets  of  liberty,  autonomy,  and  national  independence. 
That  ambition  has  striven  to  realize  itself  in  ways  not 
always  fitted  to  secure  the  approval  of  enlightened  public 
sentiment.  Unwise  and  impossible  political  and  social 
doctrines  have  been  taught.  Crude,  clumsy,  unworkable 
political  agencies  have  been  employed.  And  too  often 
methods  have  been  adopted  whose  efficiency  and  general 
application  could  only  be  secured  by  the  almost  total  dis- 
regard of  every  element  of  mercy,  equity,  pity,  and  fair 
play.  There  was  exhibited  in  recent  years,  on  the  intensely 
tragical  stage  of  Irish  life,  a  good  deal  of  the  "wild  justice 
of  revenge,"  as  Mr.  Michael  Davitt  was  pleased  to  call  it. 
And  yet  that  astute  and  ever-wakeful  politician  who  at 
present  occupies  the  chair  and  exercises  the  authority  of 
the  fabulous  St.  Peter  ( there  is  absolutely  no  reliable  evi- 
dence of  the  existence  of  a  Bishop  of  Rome  of  that  name), 
with  a  wary  and  wily  diplomacy  worthy  of  the  age  of  Hil- 
debrand,  kept  discreetly  quiet  all  the  time.  He  saw  cattle 
houghed  and  maimed,  men  and  women  slaughtered,  lonely 
families  almost  frightened  to  death  by  midnight  marauders. 
He  saw  poor  peasants  ejected  in  thousands  from  their  mis- 
erable cabins,  homesteads  burned,  crops  destroyed,  and 
every  form  of  agrarian  outrage  perpetrated.  He  saw  that 
social  anaconda,  the  boycott,  tighten  its  fatal  folds  and  re- 
lentless grip  around  helpless  individual  families.  He  saw 
the  fierce  flames  of  religious  hate  rage  continuously  for 
several  weeks  with  murderous  effect  in  a  great  and  popu- 
lous city  in  the  north  of  Ireland.  He  saw  these  scattered, 
18 


274  Ecce  Clems 

distracted,  half-maddened  sheep,  occupying  an  ancient  and 
important  corner  of  the  great  fold  over  which  he  exercises 
pastoral  oversight,  perpetrate  or  suffer  all  these  and  other 
evils,  while  other  children  of  the  same  race  and  fold  stood  on 
the  far-off  shores  of  the  American  continent  violently  ges- 
ticulating their  sympathy  with  the  things  perpetrated,  or 
their  marked  and  menancing  disapproval  of  the  things 
their  co-religionists  suffered.  He  who  presides  over  the 
Church  of 

The  milk-white  hind,  unspotted  and  unchanged, 

witnessed  all  this  and  kept  silent — that  is,  he  silently  sanc- 
tioned it  all. 

Then  suddenly,  "  like  a  thunderbolt  out  of  a  clear  sky," 
the  papal  rescript  fell  into  the  crowded  camp  of  the  Irish 
nationalists.  At  first  they  were  startled  and  surprised  at 
this  adverse  and  unexpected  turn  of  affairs.  There  was  a 
moment's  pause,  and  then  the  low,  deep  growl  of  discontent, 
varied  now  and  then  by  the  shrill  shriek  of  defiance.  Ob- 
serving this  refractory  and  insubmissive  spirit  in  large  por- 
tions of  her  flock  both  in  America  and  in  Ireland,  Rome, 
true  to  her  traditional  policy,  slackened  the  screw  and 
opened  the  jaws  of  her  vise  and  mendaciously  protested 
her  innocence  of  hostile  action  against  Irish  national  aspira- 
tions, or  of  any  intention  of  doing  what  she  had,  neverthe- 
less, deliberately  done.  "  Assure  the  municipal  authorities 
of  Dublin,"  said  the  telegram  of  Archbishop  Walsh  at 
Rome  to  the  lord  mayor  of  the  Irish  capital,  "  that  all  ap- 
prehension of  interference  by  the  holy  see  in  Irish  political 
affairs  is  groundless.  .  .  .  Protest  by  all  means  at  your 
command  in  the  strongest  terms  against  the  action  of  hos- 
tile journals  which  insult  the  holy  see  by  representing  the 
pontiff  as  a  political  partisan,  and,  at  the  same  time,  make 
it  plain  that  as  Irishmen  and  Catholics  you  are  not  to  be 
misled  by  any  such  devices  of  the  enemies  of  the  nationality 


The  Minister  in  Authority  275 

and  faith  of  Ireland."  Such  are  "  the  winding  and  crooked 
courses  "  which  the  great  English  philosopher,  Lord  Bacon, 
designated  "the  goings  of  the  serpent."  And  pity  'tis  that 
men's  perversity  and  blindness  should  provoke  the  God  of 
light  and  wisdom  to  "  send  them  such  strong  delusion  that 
they  should  believe  a  lie."  But  believe  it,  after  a  little 
angry  and  helpless  protestation,  they  have  always  done  and 
probably  always  will.* 

*  Author's  article  in  Zion's  Herald^  June  6,  1888. 


276  Ecce  Clerus 


CHAPTER  XIII 

Some  Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life  and  Char- 
acter. 

Sextons  and  undertakers  [and  preachers]  are  the  cheerfulest  people  in  the 
world  at  home,  as  comedians  and  circus  clowns  are  the  most  melancholy  in 
their  domestic  circle. 

Nobody  supposes  there  is  any  relation  between  religious  sympathy  and  those 
wretched  "  sentimental "  movements  of  the  human  heart  upon  which  it  is  com- 
monly agreed  that  nothing  better  is  based  than  society,  civilization,  friendship, 
the  relation  of  husband  and  wife  and  of  parent  and  child,  and  which  many 
people  must  think  were  singularly  overrated  by  the  Teacher  of  Nazareth,  whose 
whole  life  .  .  .  was  full  of  sentiment — loving  this  or  that  young  man,  pardon- 
ing this  or  that  sinner,  weeping  over  the  dead,  mourning  for  the  doomed  city, 
blessing  and  perhaps  kissing  the  little  children — so  that  the  gospels  are  still 
cried  over  almost  as  often  as  the  last  work  of  fiction. — Holmes^  "  Over  the  Tea- 
cups." 

\*  Past  and  Present* 

It  is  intended  in  this  chapter  to  illustrate  briefly,  by  in- 
cident and  example,  some  of  those  elements  and  features  of 
ministerial  character  which  preeminently  fit  men  for  suc- 
cessful service  in  the  Christian  pulpit  and  pastorate,  and  win 
for  them  the  esteem  and  gratitude  of  their  own  and  later 
generations,  marking,  also,  some  notable  instances  of  arrested 
development  and  degeneration  of  type. 

The  ideal  pastorate,  even  in  our  partial  and  imperfect 
conception  of  it,  has  never  been  fully  realized  but  once,  and 
is  never  likely  to  be  met  with  again.  The  model  preacher 
and  soul-winner  of  one  age  or  country  is  not  a  standard  for 
other  ages  and  countries. 

The  old  order  changeth,  yielding  place  to  new. 
And  God  fulfills  himself  in  many  ways. 

It  is  impossible  to  conceive  of  any  hero,  reformer,  martyr, 


Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life      277 

or  statesman  of  the  past  being  just  what  he  was,  saying  just 
what  he  said,  doing  just  what  he  did,  outside  his  own  age 
and  environment.  The  man  who  has  most  deeply  stamped 
the  image  of  his  moral  and  intellectual  personality  upon 
his  age  has  been  most  profoundly  influenced  by  it  in  turn; 
it  has  colored  his  beliefs  and  sentiments,  determined  the 
nature  and  direction  of  his  activities,  and  affected  apprecia- 
bly his  whole  character.  Though  the  essence  of  truth  and 
the  leading  principles  and  obligations  of  morality  remain 
unalterably  the  same  in  all  times,  the  method  of  treatment 
and  form  of  presentation,  as  determined  by  the  taste  and 
predilection  of  any  particular  period,  are  always  of  sufficient 
account  to  claim  careful  attention.  He  who  compares  the 
public  teaching  of  preachers  and  religious  writers  of  three, 
two,  or  even  one  hundred  years  ago,  as  it  has  come  down  to 
US  in  sermons  and  theological  treatises,  with  that  of  men  of 
power  and  prominence  in  our  own  time,  sees  at  a  glance 
the  distance  that  has  been  traveled  in  the  interval.  The 
body  of  doctrine  is  observed  to  be  substantially  the  same  as 
regards  all  the  leading  elements  and  features  of  "  the  faith 
once  delivered  unto  the  saints,"  but  the  spirit  of  the  olden 
time  is  dogmatic,  imperious,  polemical;  the  thought  is  militant 
and  mail-clad,  and  the  verbal  dress  antique,  odd,  and  often 
whimsical.  Even  in  the  great  ecumenical  communion,  which 
makes  the  proud  boast  of  semper  eadem,  changes  more  aptly  de- 
scribed in  their  total  effect  by  the  epithet  revolution  than  by 
the  milder  word  reform  distinguish  the  policy  and  personal 
character  of  Leo  X  from  those  of  Leo  XIII;  of  Cardinals  Cam - 
peggio,  Pole,  and  Wolsey  from  those  of  Cardinals  Rampolla, 
Manning,  and  Gibbons.  And  if  within  the  group  of  Churches 
professedly  based  on  the  principles  of  the  Reformation  a 
similar  comparison  be  made,  the  difference  between  Calvin 
and  Godet,  Luther  and  Schleiermacher,  John  Knox  and 
Thomas  Chalmers,  Archbishop  Whitgift  and  Archbishop 
Benson ;  or  (narrowing  the  period  for  comparison)  between 


278  Ecce  Clerus 

Matthew  Henry  and  Joseph  Parker,  Robert  Hall  and 
Charles  H.  Spurgeon,  John  Wesley  and  Hugh  Price  Hughes, 
Lyman  Beecher  and  Lyman  Abbott,  Bishop  Asbury  and 
Bishop  Foster,  is  even  more  striking  still. 

The  intensely  spiritual  tone  of  Richard  Baxter's  preach- 
ing, the  exhaustively  analytical  method  of  John  Owen's 
ministry,  the  epigrammatic  and  caustic  eloquence  of  South, 
the  fastidiously  choice  diction  of  Andrews,  the  lucidity  and 
logical  acumen  of  Barrow,  would  hardly  reconcile  a  modern 
audience  to  their  extreme  prolixity  and  labored  style  of 
thought.  Howe's  noble  sermon  on  '*  The  Redeemer's  Tears 
Wept  over  Lost  Souls,"  which  produced  so  powerful  an  im- 
pression in  his  day,  would  weary  an  average  congregation  in 
these  hurried  closing  years  of  the  ninteenth  century.  The 
massive  learning  and  exuberant  ornament  of  Jeremy  Tay- 
lor's sermons  of  "The  Golden  Grove  "  would  bear  him  down 
and  bury  him  in  any  community — urban  or  rural — in  our  day. 
Stephen  Charnock,  Timothy  Dwight,  John  Pearson  (author 
of  the  Exposition  of  the  Creed),  each  preached  a  complete 
system  of  divinity  to  his  people;  *  they  would  travel  far  be- 
fore finding  audiences  willing  to  be  parties  to  a  contract  of 
that  kind  now.  Against  the  steel-cold  and  self-consistent 
Calvinism  of  Jonathan  Edwards,  Charles  G.  Finney,  quite 
as  passionate  a  lover  of  souls  and  as  commendable  an  ex- 
emplar of  loyalty  to  God,  openly  rebelled,  breaking  down  a 
gap  in  the  fence  of  orthodoxy  wide  enough  for  the  whole 
ministry  of  the  Calvinistic  Churches  to  escape  from  the  brick 
fields  of  Pharaoh,  where,  as  the  taskmasters  of  a  morally  in- 
defensible doctrine  of  God,  of  moral  government  and  re- 
demption, they  had  been  accustomed  for  generations  to  im- 
pose on  men  with  varying  degrees  of  conviction  the  duty  of 
making  brick  without  straw — that  is,  of  repenting  of  sins  in 
which  they  were,  by  a  divine  decree,  foredoomed  eternally  to 

*  President  Dwight  preached  his  divinity  sermons  to  the  students  in  the   collie 
chapel  at  Vale ;  Charnock  and  Pearson,  in  the  ordinary  course  of  their  ministry. 


Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life      279 

perish.  The  Five  Points  of  the  historic  synod  of  Dort  have 
"  folded  their  tents  "  and  gone.  Nobody  preaches  the  Cal- 
vinism of  Geneva  now. 

2.  Facing  Initial  Difficulties. 

Moral  ideals  and  standards,  however,  have  an  authority 
and  value  of  their  own  quite  irrespective  of  those  changes 
in  theological  belief  and  opinion,  in  times  and  circumstances, 
which  so  often  affect  the  popular  appreciation  of  them.  And 
there  are  certain  threads  of  gold  present  from  the  first  in  the 
warp  and  weft  of  noble  and  powerful  natures,  no  matter 
what  the  age  or  social  setting  in  which  their  lot  is  cast.  A 
man's  providential  designation  to  usefulness  and  fame  is 
usually  evinced  in  the  manner  in  which  he  meets  and  con- 
quers the  difficulties  that  obstruct  his  path  and  challenge  his 
resolution  and  resources  at  the  outset.  Of  the  portal  of  the 
ministry,  as  of  the  "kingdom  of  God,"  it  may  be  said, 
"  Strait  is  the  gate,  and  narrow  is  the  way  ,  .  .  and  few  there 
be  [comparatively]  that  find  it."  While  a  few  distinguished 
preachers  have  burst  suddenly  upon  the  attention  of  the 
world,  the  divine  order  for  by  far  the  larger  number  has 
been  to  make  haste  slowly,  and  to  acquire  by  years  of  ex- 
perience and  successful  toil  the  fame  and  power  which  ex- 
ceptional ability  wins  by  a  single  stroke  of  genius.  The  pro- 
found learning,  metaphysical  subtlety,  and  masterly  facility 
and  aptitude  in  debate  of  the  young  deacon  of  Alexandria 
impressed  the  fathers  of  Nicaea,  and  placed  him  at  twenty- 
six  among  the  foremost  thinkers  and  teachers  of  the  East- 
ern Church.  At  twenty-five  John  Calvin  was  not  only  the 
first  theologian  in  Europe,  but  ventured  at  that  early  age 
to  attempt  through  Nicholas  Cop,  rector  of  the  Sorbonne, 
the  reformation  of  theological  science  in  the  greatest  uni- 
versity in  Christendom,  and,  like  the  great  monk  of  the 
twelfth  century,  St.  Bernard  of  Clairvaux,  even  to  offer 
needful  though  unpalatable  admonitions  and  counsels  to  one 


280  Ecce  Clerus 

of  the  most  powerful  princes  of  his  age.  Calvin's  address  to 
Francis  I  prefacing  his  Instituiiones  Christiana  Religionis  is 
as  remarkable  for  its  sagacity  and  courage  as  for  its  ability 
and  eloquence.  As  a  boy  preacher  Spurgeon  delighted 
and  edified  nearly  a  dozen  small  audiences  in  the  sparsely 
populated  villages  of  the  English  Fen  Country  for  some 
time  before  he  went  to  London.  Before  he  was  quite 
twenty  he  had  the  entire  press  of  the  great  city  either  cry- 
ing him  down  as  a  pulpit  clown  and  theological  charlatan 
or  hailing  his  advent  as  the  Chrysostom  of  the  metropolitan 
pulpit.  Savonarola,  on  the  other  hand,  was  frequently  the 
victim  of  discouragement  and  melancholy  on  account  of 
repeated  failure  before  he  suddenly  acquired  the  fascinating 
and  persuasive  power  over  large  audiences  which  marked 
his  wonderfully  successful  ministry  in  Florence.  Robert 
Hall  did  not  acquire  the  confidence  and  self-possession  with 
which  he  was  accustomed  to  address  large  and  select  audi- 
ences without  severe  self-discipline  and  many  humiliating 
failures  ;  and  even  then  moments  of  depression  occasionally 
threatened  to  drive  him  from  a  calling  of  which  he  became 
so  distinguished  an  ornament.  Seizing  the  opportunity  of 
hearing,  during  a  visit  to  London,  Dr.  Andrew  Fuller 
preach,  he  returned  home  so  dissatisfied  with  his  own  ministry 
and  so  depressed  with  the  precarious  condition  of  his  health 
that  he  resolved  at  once  to  resign  his  pulpit.  But  while  the 
officials  of  his  church  were  endeavoring,  with  small  prospect 
of  success,  to  bring  about  the  withdrawal  of  his  resignation 
a  somewhat  pompous  and  pedantic  brother  of  the  same  de- 
nomination called  on  him,  late  in  the  week,  whom  he  urged 
to  preach  on  the  following  Sunday.  The  poor  performance 
of  the  supply  had  an  effect  which  the  arguments  of  Hall's 
friends  had  failed  to  produce.  On  entering  the  minister's 
vestry  after  the  morning  service  Hall's  deacons  were  sur- 
prised to  hear  him  say  to  the  visiting  preacher,  "  Sir,  I  am 
your  debtor,  unspeakably  your  debtor,  sir,"  as  it  seemed  to 


Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life      281 

them  the  sermon  was  remarkable  for  nothing  except  its  ped- 
antry and  emptiness.  "Sir,"  continued  Hall,  "your  sermon 
has  done  me  good  ;  it  has  broken  a  snare  in  which  the  devil 
had  entangled  me.  I  had  been  up  to  London  and  had  heard 
that  great  man.  Dr.  Fuller,  and  was  so  mortified  with  myself 
that  I  resolved  never  to  preach  again.  But,  sir,  I  have 
heard  you,  and  now,  sir,  I  shall  preach  again  with  some 
comfort." 

The  high  standard  formed  in  his  early  ministry,  and 
strenuously  maintained  in  subsequent  years,  not  only  be- 
came an  occasion  of  fastidious  anxiety  to  him  hardly  com- 
patible with  the  highest  aims  and  motives  of  the  ministerial 
calling,  but  also  totally  incapacitated  him  to  listen  with  pa- 
tience to  public  speakers  of  average  ability.  Having  ac- 
companied a  brother  minister  to  a  missionary  meeting 
where  the  distinguished  Wesleyan  orator,  the  Rev.  Richard 
Watson,  had  spoken  with  characteristic  power  and  impress- 
iveness,  he  said  to  his  friend,  after  hearing  a  sentence  or  two 
of  the  speaker  who  followed,  "  Let  us  go ;  this  is  always  the 
way  with  showmen — the  lions  first  and  the  monkeys  after." 

Two  men  more  unlike  than  Robert  Hall  and  John  Bunyan 
it  would  be  difficult  to  name  in  the  same  breath.  Both 
were  typical  Englishmen.  Both  were  men  of  genius.  Both 
were  distinguished  as  preachers  and  writers  and  masters  of 
idiomatic  English.  The  writings  of  both,  by  universal  con- 
sent, have  been  assigned  a  place  among  the  classics  of 
English  literature.  Both  did  much  to  elevate  the  tone  and 
status  of  the  Baptist  denomination  in  their  time.  But 
somewhere  hereabouts  the  resemblance  ends.  The  genius 
of  the  one  was  an  elaborately  polished  gem,  indebted  for 
much  of  its  luster  to  academic  training  and  acquisition  ; 
the  genius  of  the  other  was  a  diamond  in  the  rough,  whose 
light  owed  nothing  to  the  lapidary  of  the  schools.  And 
while  the  works  of  the  one  lose  value  as  they  take  on  age, 
the  productions  of  the  other  steadily  retain  their  place  and 


282  Ecce  Clerus 

worth  as  salable  wares  in  the  intellectual  market  of  the 
world.  But  in  the  circumstances  of  their  lives  the  dissimi- 
larity is  even  greater  than  in  the  character  and  product  of 
their  genius. 

Probably  not  one  in  a  thousand  could  have  emerged 
from  the  severe  and  humiliating  discipline  of  Bunyan's 
early  ministry — continued  without  interruption  for  more 
than  a  dozen  years — with  so  much  to  awaken  admiration 
and  so  little  to  excite  criticism  or  occasion  regret.  To 
most  men  exposure  from  day  to  day  to  the  glances  of  the 
passing  crowd  on  Bedford  bridge — the  proud  scorn  of  one, 
the  tender  pity  of  another,  the  hideous,  malignant  merri- 
ment of  a  third,  the  burning,  sympathetic  indignation  of  a 
fourth,  the  cold  indifference  of  a  fifth — with  his  little  blind 
daughter  at  his  side,  selling  the  tagged  laces  made  within 
his  prison  walls  to  provide  the  sightless  little  angel  and  his 
wife  and  other  children  some  scant  means  of  subsistence — 
would  have  been  hopelessly  crushing.  And  yet  with  such 
a  workman,  with  that  old  Bedford  bridge  and  jail  as  scaf- 
folding, and  with  such  pathetic  scenes  and  incidents  as 
accessories,  the  greatest  and  alone  immortal  artist — the 
providence  of  God — was  slowly  and  unobservedly  painting 
one  of  the  noblest  and  most  imperishable  frescos  that 
adorn  the  stately  dome  of  modern  history,  and  teaching  an 
object  lesson  whose  significance  and  power  two  eventful 
centuries  have  not  sufficed  to  exhaust.  Of  nothing  particu- 
larly great  or  good  did  the  opening  years  of  John  Wesley's 
ministry  give  any  promise.  Of  the  career  of  few  men  has 
the  familiar  phrase /<?r  angusta  ad  augusta — through  critical 
and  trying  circumstances  to  a  state  of  triumph — been  more 
aptly  descriptive.  His  miserable  failure  in  Savannah — a 
failure  due  more  to  want  of  tact  than  to  lack  of  talent,  to 
viciousness  of  method  than  to  defectiveness  of  motive — 
would  have  been  fatal  to  the  prospects  of  any  man  less 
nobly  gifted,  less  evenly  balanced,  less  cultured,  less  reso- 


Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life      283 

lute,  less  high-minded,  and  less  pure.  It  was  during  some 
weeks  of  wandering  among  the  ancient  shrines  and  monu- 
ments of  the  Catholic  Church  in  Rome  and  in  Sicily  in 
1833,  as  he  himself  records,  that  the  "irrepressible  conflict" 
began  in  the  mind  of  John  Henry  Newman  between  his  re- 
ligious sympathies  and  his  intellectual  convictions;  between 
his  reverence  for  antiquity  and  his  reluctant  recognition  of 
the  clearer  and  fuller  light  of  his  own  times,  which  gener- 
ated the  vacillation  and  uncertainty  that  gave  birth  to  one 
of  the  most  famous  though  by  no  means  most  meritorious  of 
modern  hymns, 

Lead,  kindly  Light,  amid  the  encircling  gloom, 

and  culminated  in  his  secession  to  the  Catholic  communion 
in  1846* 

On  the  destiny  of  Joseph  Ernest  Renan,  in  whom  the  ra- 
tionalism of  Europe,  and  particularly  of  France,  found  for 
more  than  a  generation  its  most  scholarly  exponent  and 
apostle,  the  opposition  of  the  demands  of  reason  to  the 
requirements  of  faith  had  a  very  different  effect.  Desig- 
nated from  childhood  to  the  Catholic  priesthood,  his  faith 
faltered  and  finally  perished  in  the  skeptical  atmosphere  of 
Paris,  and,  descending  the  steps  of  St.  Sulspice  for  the  last 
time,  he  deliberately  disembarked  from  the  ancient,  weather- 
beaten  "Ark  of  Salvation  "  just  at  the  moment  Newman  was 
seeking  admission  to  its  proffered  security  and  repose.  And 
while,  in  spite  of  a  prospect  outwardly  the  most  inviting, 

•  In  his  Apologia  pro  Vita  sua  Newman  relates  the  circumstances  under  which  the 
well-known  hymn  was  composed  and  he  himself  first  became  conscious  of  an  impulse 
toward  Rome.  He  and  Hurrell  Froude  visited  Monsignore  (afterward  Cardinal) 
Wiseman  at  the  College  Inglese  and  were  pressed  to  repeat  their  visit,  when  Newman 
said,  diplomatically,  "We  have  a  work  to  do  in  England."  Subsequently  he  fell  ill  of 
fever  in  Leonforte,  Sicily,  and  was  expected  to  die.  Recovering,  he  set  off  for  Palermo. 
Before  leaving  his  inn  he  "  sat  down  on  the  bed  and  sobbed  bitterly."  To  the  question 
of  his  attendant  as  to  what  was  the  matter  his  answer  was.  "  I  have  a  work  to  do  m 
England."  "  I  was  aching  to  get  home,  yet  for  want  of  a  vessel  I  was  kept  at  Palermo  for 
three  weeks.  I  began  to  visit  the  churches,  and  they  calmed  my  patience,  though  I 
did  not  attend  any  services.  I  knew  nothing  of  the  presence  of  the  Blessed  Sacrament 
there.  At  last  I  got  off  in  an  orange  boat  bound  for  Marseilles.  We  were  becalmed  a 
whole  week  in  the  Straits  of  Bonifacio.  Then  it  was  I  wrote  the  lines  '  Lead,  kindly 
Light,'  which  have  since  become  well  known."    (p.  83.) 


284  Ecce  Clems 

Emerson  was  bidding  a  friendly  farewell  to  his  parishioners 
in  the  city  of  Boston,  retiring  from  the  "good  fight  of 
faith  "  before  he  had  incurred  many  scars,*  a  young  lawyer 
of  a  remote  New  York  village,  in  spite  of  the  cold  shoulder 
accorded  him  by  some  of  his  brethren,  and  their  severe 
criticisms  of  his  doctrines  and  methods,  was  putting  his 
hand  more  firmly  to  the  plow  he  had  already  learned  to 
guide  in  furrows  deep  and  straight  through  the  moral  con- 
sciousness of  the  Gospel-loving  communities  of  central  and 
western  New  York.  Returning  from  the  New  Lebanon 
(N.  Y.)  Convention,  whither,  with  other  notable  Congrega- 
tionalists  of  the  time,  he  had  gone  for  the  purpose  of  con- 
fronting and  exposing  the  supposed  errors  of  Finney  and 
his  sympathizers,  Lyman  Beecher,  then  at  the  height  of  his 
influence  in  Boston,  casually  remarked  to  the  landlord  of  the 
hotel  where  he  stopped  for  dinner,  "We  crossed  the  moun- 
tains expecting  to  meet  a  company  of  boys,  but  we  found 
them  to  be  full-grown  men."f 

3.  The  Consciousness  of  Worth, 

This  sense  of  worth  and  of  capacity  which  modestly 
asserts  itself  at  the  start  is  the  same  quality  which,  when  sub- 
sequently challenged,  unfolds  itself  in  painstaking  labor,  in 
fidelity  to  duty,  in  acts  of  moral  courage  and  scorn  of  threat- 
ened consequences.  In  the  soul  of  the  man  whose  masterly 
intellect  framed  the  iron-clad  clauses  of  the  Nicene  Creed 
discerning  men  saw  the  self-eifacing,  self-sacrificing  spirit 
that  was  ready  to  defend  the  doctrines  of  that  historic 
symbol  in  the  face  of  repeated  banishment  and  in  the  con- 
tinual prospect  of  death.  Men  who  had  known  the  sin- 
cerely devout  and  calmly  resolute  spirit  of  Bernard,  the  sim- 
ple monk  of  Citeaux,  were  not  surprised  at  the  manner  in 

*  Hardly  anything  could  be  more  beautiful  than  Emerson's  last  words  to  his  people. 
See  below  "  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death." 
+  Dr.  Wright's  Li/e  of  Finney^  p.  94. 


Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life        285 

which,  as  Abbot  of  Clairvaux,  he  swayed  large  councils  like 
Sens  and  Vezelay,  reprimanded  warlike  counts,  and  com- 
pelled attention  to  his  counsels  on  the  part  of  popes  and 
kings.*  The  Hildebrand  of  history — self-appointed  disposer 
of  princely  crowns  and  dominions — was  the  most  natural  evo- 
lution imaginable  from  the  sovereign  personality  who,  prior  to 
his  investiture  with  the  pallium  of  the  pontificate,  had  always 
been  greater  than  any  position  he  had  been  called  to  occupy, 
and  had  for  years  practically  shaped  the  policy  and  con- 
trolled the  hand  of  whomsoever  happened  nominally  to  hold 
the  helm  of  power  at  Rome.  Those  who  are  accustomed  to 
look  for  the  presence  of  law  in  the  successive  stages  of  human 
development  will  not  fail  to  perceive  that  Spurgeon's  reply  to 
his  anti-Calvinistic  critics  at  the  opening  of  his  ministry  in 
London,  f  and  his  firm  refusal  to  leave  the  post  of  duty  for  a 
few  months  in  the  later  years  of  his  life  for  a  tempting  pecun- 
iary consideration  which  would  have  proved  overwhelming 
to  the  weakness  of  most  men,  belong  naturally  to  the  same 
sublime  moral  category,  and  illustrate  with  equal  pertinence 
"the  final  perseverance  of  the  saints." J  "Who  are  you?" 
demanded   Mary,  Queen  of  Scots,  of  John  Knox,  with  a 

*See  J.  Cotter  Morrison's  Life  of  St.  Bernard  of  Clairvaux . 

t"A  very  kind  friend  has  told  me  that  while  I  was  preaching  in  Exeter  Hall  I  ought 
to  pay  deference  to  the  varied  opinions  of  my  hearers ;  that  albeit  I  may  be  a  Calvinist 
and  a  Baptist,  I  should  recollect  that  there  is  a  variety  of  creeds  here.  Now,  were  I 
to  preach  nothing  but  what  pleased  the  whole  lot  of  you,  what  on  earth  should  I  do  ?  I 
preach  what  I  believe  to  be  true,  and  if  the  omission  of  a  single  truth  that  I  believe 
would  make  me  King  of  England  throughout  eternity,  I  would  not  leave  it  out.  Those 
who  do  not  like  what  I  have  to  say  have  the  option  of  leaving  it.  They  come  here,  I 
suppose  to  please  themselves,  and  if  the  truth  does  not  please  them,  they  can  leave  it." 
— Sermons,  vol.  i. 

i  The  Redpath  Lyceum  Bureau  having  noticed  in  a  Boston  paper  a  statement  to  the 
effect  that  Spurgeon  was  coming  to  America,  inclosed  the  paragraph  and  wrote  : 

"  Boston,  Mass.,  June  22,  1876. 

"  Dear  Sir :  Is  the  above  paragraph  true  ?  We  have  tried  so  long  and  so  hard  for  many 
years  to  secure  you  that  we  thought  it  impossible,  and  long  since  gave  up  all  hope.  We 
are  the  exclusive  agents  of  all  the  leading  lecturers  in  America.^  We  will  give  you  a 
thousand  dollars  in  gold  for  every  lecture  you  deliver  in  America,  and  pay  all_  your 
expenses  to  and  from  your  home,  and  place  you  under  the  most  popular  auspices  in  the 
country.     Will  you  come  ?  " 

To  this  offer  Mr.  Spurgeon  replied  in  less  than  two  weeks :  "  Gentlemen,  I  cannot 
imagine  how  such  a  paragraph  should  appear  in  your  papers  except  by  deliberate  inven- 
tion of  a  hard-up  editor,  for  I  never  had  any  idea  of  leaving  home  for  America  for  some 
time  to  come.  As  I  said  to  you  before,  if  1  could  come,  I  am  not  a  lecturer,  nor  would 
I  receive  money  for  preaching^ 


286  Ecce  Clerus 

characteristic  blending  of  petulance  and  scorn,  when  the 
great  reformer  urged  the  claims  of  Scotland's  emancipated 
thought  and  awakened  conscience  to  royal  consideration. 
"I  am  a  puir  sinfu'  mon,"  was  the  reply,  "but,  nevertheless, 
a  vera  loyal  and  profitable  subject  o'  this  realm  o'  Scotland." 
When  one  of  his  bitterest  clerical  opponents  charged  John 
Wesley  with  "stabbing  the  Church  to  her  very  vitals  "  he 
retorted:  "  Do  I  or  you  do  this  ?  Let  anyone  who  has  read  her 
liturgy,  articles,  and  homilies  judge.  .  .  .  You  desire  that  I 
should  disown  the  Church,  But  I  choose  to  stay  in  the 
Church,  were  it  only  to  reprove  those  who  betray  her  with 
a  kiss."  *  The  writer  remembers  passing  through  a  small 
English  hamlet  where  stands  a  neat  little  church  in  which 
the  founder  of  Methodism  publicly  rebuked  the  wealthiest 
and  most  influential  man  in  all  the  region.  The  magnate 
in  question  had  yielded  to  a  fit  of  unseasonable  merriment, 
laughing  immoderately  like  a  rude  boy  during  the  sermon. 
The  preacher  paused,  looked  at  the  offender  for  a  moment 
with  an  expression  of  pain  and  disgust,  and  said,  "  I  regard 
the  sneer  of  a  mortal  no  more  than  the  laugh  of  a  monkey." 

4,  The  Courage  of  Conviction. 

Sometimes  this  invincible  courage  ran  risks  which  could 
hardly  be  justified  under  ordinary  circumstances,  but  it 
seems  seldom  to  have  failed  to  accomplish  its  object.  Of 
the  Methodist  Society  in  the  old  city  of  Norwich  Wesley 
writes:  "  I  told  them  in  plain  terms  that  they  were  the  most 
ignorant,  self-conceited,  self-willed,  fickle,  untractable,  disor- 
derly, disjointed  society  that  I  knew  in  the  three  kingdoms. 
And  God  applied  it  to  their  hearts,  so  that  many  were  prof- 
ited, but  I  do  not  find  that  one  was  offended."  f  A  similar 
instance  of  courage,  also  happily  justified  in  the  result,  is 
recorded  in  Dr.  Wright's  Zt/e  of  C.  G.  Finney.     In  a  sermon 

*  The  English  Church  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  p.  i8o. 
tTyerman's  Li/e  of  Wesley,  vol.  ii,  p.  334. 


Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life      287 

on  the  "  Signs  of  a  Seared  Conscience "  the  president  of 
Oberlin  is  reported  to  have  waked  up  the  slumbering  "  moral 
sense"  of  his  delinquent  professional  brethren  thus  :  "Just 
consider  the  condition  in  which  I  found  myself  yesterday. 
I  engaged  a  number  of  men  to  make  the  garden  and  put  in 
my  crops  ;  but  when  I  went  to  look  for  my  farming  tools  I 
could  not  find  them.  Brother  Mahan  borrowed  my  plow 
some  time  ago,  and  has  forgotten  to  bring  it  back ;  Brother 
Morgan  has  borrowed  my  harrow,  and  I  presume  has  it  still; 
Brother  Beecher  has  my  spade  and  my  hoe,  and  so  my  tools 
were  all  scattered.  Where  many  of  them  are  no  man  knows. 
I  appeal  to  you,  how  can  society  exist  when  such  a  simple 
duty  as  that  of  returning  borrowed  tools  ceases  to  rest  as  a 
burden  upon  the  conscience  ?  It  is  in  such  delinquencies 
as  these  that  the  real  state  of  our  hearts  is  brought  to  the 
light  of  day."  "  The  effect  of  this  appeal,"  says  Finney's 
biographer,  "  was  everywhere  visible  on  the  following  day. 
,  .  .  .  All  through  the  day  farming  implements,  and  tools 
came  in  from  every  quarter.  .  ,  .  Tools  came  in  that  Finney 
had  never  owned  and  never  heard  of.  Where  they  belonged 
was  more  than  any  man  was  ever  able  to  tell,"  * 

Nowhere  is  the  holy  daring  bom  of  a  sense  of  personal 
worth  and  an  unwavering  confidence  in  God  more  constantly 
in  demand  than  in  thus  proclaiming  the  Gospel  of  the  grace  of 
God,  and  in  no  department  of  clerical  duty  is  its  absence  more 
enfeebling  and  disastrous.  The  venerable  Dr,  Newman  Hall 
tells  of  a  well-known  English  clergyman  that,  observing  in 
his  audience  on  one  occasion  the  celebrated  Wesleyan 
preacher,  Dr.  Morley  Punshon,  and  the  still  more  distin- 
guished temperance  orator,  J,  B,  Gough,  it  occurred  to  him 
that  he  ought  to  apologize  for  not  being  better  prepared. 
*'  Never  mind,"  audibly  protested  a  parishioner,  offended  at 
the  minister's  undervaluation  of  the  intelligence  of  his  regu- 
ular    hearers,  "they   are   only   worms."     "Yes,"  said    the 

♦  Page  272, 


288  Ecce  Clems 

preacher,  making  matters  definitely  worse  by  a  crude  and 
precarious  speculation  worthy  of  an  amateur  skolekologist, 
"  but  there  is  a  great  difference  in  worms,"  To  one,  newly 
appointed  chaplain  to  Queen  Victoria  and  seeking  his  advice 
as  to  how  he  ought  to  preach  before  the  sovereign  of  Eng- 
land, Dr.  Wilberforce,  Bishop  of  Oxford,  father  of  Canon 
Wilberforce,  of  Southampton,  and  of  the  present  Bishop  of 
Newcastle,  said:  "You  will  have  others  in  the  royal  chapel 
besides  the  queen — members  and  servants  of  the  royal  house- 
hold from  the  highest  to  the  humblest.  I  would  advise  you 
to  preach  to  her  majesty  with  the  same  affectionate  fidelity 
and  earnestness  as  you  would  preach  to  the  humblest  person 
present,  or  your  effort  will  be  a  failure."  The  man  who  has 
never  felt  the  majesty  and  greatness  of  God  in  such  a  man- 
ner as  to  realize  the  littleness  and  feebleness  of  man  lacks  one 
of  the  most  elementary  and  most  vital  qualifications  for  the 
ambassadorship  of  the  cross.  **  You  have  imitated  David  in 
his  sin,  imitate  him  in  his  repentance,"  was  the  firm  insist- 
ence of  St.  Ambrose  as  he  interdicted  the  Emperor  Theodo- 
sius  from  entering  the  Church  after  his  merciless  massacre  of 
the  citizens  of  Antioch.  *'  He  has  done  his  duty,  now  let  us 
do  ours,"  was  the  reply  of  Louis  XIV  to  one  who  suggested 
that  the  speech  of  Bourdaloue,  the  court  preacher,  had  been 
unbecomingly  plain  and  pungent.  **  Isaiah  is  very  bold  " 
can  only  be  said  of  the  prophet  who  has  seen  "  the  Lord 
seated  upon  a  throne,  high  and  lifted  up,"  with  "his  train 
filling  the  temple." 

5.  The  Sense  of  Humor^  Pathos^  and  Romance. 

No  less  essential  than  the  heroic  qualities  just  described 
and  quite  as  truly  a  gift  of  God  is  the  readiness  to  recognize 
the  claims  of  the  minor  and  more  equivocal  phases  of  human 
nature — the  wit  and  sparkle,  the  humor,  pathos,  and  romance, 
the  depth  and  tenderness,  of  the  soul — items  which  are  all 
duly  sampled  and  sanctioned  in  the  greatest  and  divinest  of 


Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life      289 

books.  The  author  of  Over  the  Teacups  sees  in  the  words, 
"Thou  art  Peter  {petros],  and  upon  this  rock  \jetra\  will  I 
build  my  Church,"  the  playful  humor  that  delights  in  pun- 
ning, and  though  when  he  suggests  this  a  "  teacup  "  warns 
him  against  stepping  with  sandaled  feet  upon  holy  ground, 
the  case  is  still  a  clear  one.*  "  Go  ye  and  tell  that  fox," 
etc.,  is  a  flash  of  sarcasm  razorlike  in  its  keenness,  and 
irony  is  obvious  in  the  words,  "  Full  well  do  ye  reject  the 
commandment  of  God,  that  ye  may  keep  your  tradition  " 
(Mark  vii,  9).  If  in  the  writings  of  any  author  noted  for 
pregnant  and  pithy  sayings,  from  Solomon  to  Sydney  Smith, 
the  words  concerning  the  symbol  of  political  subjection — 
the  penny  bearing  the  image  and  superscription  of  Caesar — 
had  been  found,  "  Render  to  Caesar  the  things  that  are 
Caesar's,  and  to  God  the  things  that  are  God's,"  they  would 
have  been  in  everybody's  mouth  as  a  precious  scintillation 
of  superlative  wit.  And  as  for  the  romance  of  emotion, 
Peter's  tears  in  the  twilight  outside  the  Hall  of  Judgment, 
and  Paul's  parting  with  the  Ephesian  elders  on  the  Milesian 
shore,  to  say  nothing  of  the  scene  at  the  grave  of  Lazarus, 
or  that  at  the  entering  in  of  Nain,  or  that  in  the  descent  of 
Olivet,  when  "  he  beheld  the  city,  and  wept  over  it,"  are 
examples  of  pathos  unsurpassed  in  any  other  literature. 

In  such  scenes  and  situations  a  minister's  life  abounds. 
In  the  pulpit  and  among  his  people  he  plays  on  a  harp  "  of 
divers  tones,"  and  he  himself  is  a  harp  in  turn,  played  upon, 
whether  he  will  or  no,  by  artists  or  amateurs  of  varying 
purpose,  character,  and  capacity.  Hamlet,  with  his  suspi- 
cions aroused,  may  protest  against  being  played  upon  like  a 
flute,  but  Hamlet  off  guard  leaves  the  gateway  of  the  soul 
open  to  influences  and  impressions  from  without  like  the 
rest  of  us.  No  other  professional  man  touches  so  many 
aspects  of  existence  and  elicits  so  many  latent  feelings  of 
the  soul  as  the  Christian  minister.     No  other  man's  plum- 

*  Page  61. 

19 


290  Ecce  Clerus 

met  goes  so  deep  down  into  the  ocean  of  human  life.  While 
the  physician,  the  lawyer,  the  statesman,  the  philanthropist, 
the  philosopher,  the  novelist,  the  poet,  are  not  obliged  to 
concern  themselves  with  anything  more  than  surface  phe- 
nomena, he  is  often  overboard  in  troubled  waters — fathoms 
deep.  A  close  and  sympathetic  student  of  life  and  of  the 
soul  in  all  their  variety  of  mood,  motive,  susceptibility,  and 
experience,  his  vocation  broadens  him  beyond  the  limits  of 
his  sect  or  creed,  and  his  wide  contact  with  life,  in  its  man- 
ifoldness  and  complexity,  convinces  him  that  there  are  more 
things  in  heaven  and  earth  than  are  dreamt  of  in  any  man's 
philosophy.  He  finds  that  there  are  heads  as  long  and  level, 
wits  as  quick  and  nimble,  hearts  as  pure  and  tender,  and 
lives  as  noble  and  exemplary,  as  his  own,  even  if  self-esteem 
permit  his  concession  to  go  no  farther  ;  that  the  human  soul 
is  deeper  and  richer  than  he  had  imagined,  and  is  capable  of 
a  fuller  and  more  varied  expression  than  he  had  ever  thought 
of,  and  that  the  neglected  chord,  touched  carelessly  and  at 
random,  it  may  be  by  the  wayside,  often  vibrates  with  a 
response  of  surprising  brilliance,  fullness,  and  power.  Dr. 
Jobson,  at  one  time  president  of  the  Wesleyan  Conference, 
during  an  official  visit  to  Ireland  was  astonished  to  hear  the 
fervid  eloquence  of  gratitude  and  benediction  which  flowed 
from  the  lips  of  a  poor  Irish  woman  to  whom  in  a  preoccu- 
pied moment  he  had  thrown  a  penny.  "May  your  honor  live," 
she  said,  **  until  every  hair  of  your  head  is  grown  into  a 
mold  candle  to  light  your  honor  to  glory." 

It  was  in  a  typical  Scotch  home,  redolent  of  theological 
lore  and  disquisition,  that  the  laugh  was  turned  on  Dr.  Pun- 
shon,  when,  on  being  asked  after  dinner  to  take  an  apple,  he 
replied,  "  No,  thank  you,  I  do  not  care  for  apples; "  thus  pro- 
voking the  happy  sally,  "  Then  ye  sho'd  ha'  ben  in  Paradis' 
and  ther'  wad'  na  ha'  been  a  Fa'."  Like  lightning  itself  the 
flash  of  genius  comes,  unheralded,  and  from  unexpected 
quarters.     It  is  often  surprising  to  what  an  extent  the  beast- 


Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life      291 

liest  vices  leave  the  mental  faculties  unhampered  and  un- 
clouded, suggesting  the  necessity  of  treating  every  creature 
bearing  the  image  of  God,  regardless  of  character  or  con- 
dition, with  respect  and  consideration. 

Ian  Maclaren,  in  his  Auld  Lang  Syne,  has  not  overdrawn 
in  the  person  of  Posty,  the  whisky-loving  village  letter  carrier 
of  Drumtochty,  that  painfully  interesting  character,  the  pious 
drunkard — black  sheep  of  almost  every  fold  and  burden  of 
every  faithful  pastor's  heart : 

"'  Sit  down,  Posty,  sit  down,  lam  very  glad  to  see  you.' 
*  Thank  ye,  sir,'  said  Posty,  in  his  dryest  voice,  anticipating 
exactly  what  Cunningham  was  after,  and  fixing  that  unhappy 
man  with  a  stony  stare  which  brought  the  perspiration  to  his 
forehead,  '  There  is  one  thing,  however,  that  I  wanted  to 
say  to  you,  and,  Posty,  you  will  understand  that  it  is  a — little 
difficult — in  fact,  to  mention,'  and  Cunningham  fumbled 
with  some  Greek  proofs.  *  What's  yir  wull,  sir  ? '  inquired 
Posty,  keeping  Cunningham  under  his  relentless  eye.  *  Well, 
it's  simply,'  and  then  Cunningham  detected  a  new  flavor  in 
the  atmosphere,  and  concluded  that  Posty  had  been  given 
into  his  hands,  'that — there's  a  very  strong  smell  of  spirits 
in  the  room.'  '  A'  noticed  that  masel',  sir,  the  meenut  a'  cam 
in,  but  a'  didna  like  to  say  onything  aboot  it,'  and  Posty 
regarded  Cunningham  with  an  expression  of  sympathetic  tol- 
eration. '  You  don't  mean  to  say,'  and  Cunningham  was  much 
agitated,  *  that  you  think — '  *  Dinna  pit  yersel'  aboot,  sir,' 
said  Posty,  in  a  consoling  voice,  *  or  suppose  a'  wud  say  a 
word  ootside  this  room.  Na,  na,  there's  times  a'm  the  better 
o'  gless  mysel',  and  it's  no  possible  ye  could  trachle  through 
the  Greek  withoot  a  bit  tonic  ;  but  ye're  safe  wi'  me,'  said 
Posty,  departing  at  the  right  moment." 

But  it  is  not  in  their  lighter  moods  and  more  propitious 
circumstances  that  the  clergyman  obtains  the  broadest  and 
clearest  glimpses  into  the  life  and  character  of  his  people. 
The   deepest  and  truest  sympathy  and  warmest  sense  of 


292  Ecce  Clerus 

brotherhood  come  more  through  broken  hearts  than  brilliant 
repartee,  and  souls  are  closer  drawn  together  by  communion 
in  sorrows  than  by  fellowship  in  joys.  "  All  sorrows  are  sis- 
ters," says  Sabatier.  "  A  secret  intelligence  establishes  it- 
self between  troubled  hearts,  however  diverse  their  griefs. 
Suffering  is  the  true  cement  of  love.  For  men  to  love  each 
other  truly  they  must  shed  tears  together.'**  "Whom  the 
Lord  loveth  he  chasteneth."  And  the  moral  worth  and 
beauty  that  are  pleasing  to  God  also  attract  the  admiration 
of  men.  The  rarest  and  choicest  spirits  in  a  minister's  cir- 
cle of  friends  and  acquaintances  are  often  the  uncomplain- 
ing martyrs  of  affliction,  bereavement,  ill  fortune,  and  nar- 
row circumstances,  just  as  it  is  the  crushed  plant  that  yields 
the  aroma.  "Prosperity,"  says  Lord  Bacon,  "is  the  bless- 
ing of  the  Old  Testament,  adversity  is  the  blessing  of  the 
New,  which  carrieth  the  greater  benediction  and  the  clearer 
revelation  of  God's  favor.  Yet  even  in  the  Old  Testament, 
if  you  listen  to  David's  harp,  you  shall  hear  as  many  hearse- 
like airs  as  carols ;  and  the  pencil  of  the  Holy  Ghost  hath 
labored  more  in  describing  the  afflictions  of  Job  than  the 
felicities  of  Solomon."f  No  faithful  pastor  needs  to  be 
warned  against  hearing  with  "a  disdainful  smile" 

The  short  and  simple  annals  of  the  poor. 

Nor  do  his  observation  and  experience  confirm  the  impres- 
sion that  "  penury  "  tends  to  chill  and  "  repress  their  noble 

rage," 

And  freeze  the  genial  current  of  the  soul. 

Travelers  in  Europe  often  comment  on  the  deeper  and 
steadier  piety  of  the  Swedish,  Norwegian,  and  Muscovite 
peasantry,  and  their  greater  loyalty  to  their  religious  leaders 
and  instructors  amid  the  poverty  and  hardship  of  their 
earthly  lot,  as  compared  with  the  more  favored  dwellers  in 

♦  Life  of  St.  Francis  iFAssisi,  p.  25. 

t  Essays,  Adversity.  * 


Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life      293 

the  sunnier  and  richer  lands  of  southern  Europe,  such  as 
France,  Spain,  and  Italy,  strongly  reminding  one  of  Tenny- 
son's lines  ascribing  to  the  one  the  characteristics  of  fickle- 
ness and  love  of  change,  and  to  the  other  the  attributes  of 
firmness  and  fidelity : 

Swallow,  swallow,  swallow  flying  south, 
Dark  and  true  and  tender  is  the  north. 

The  periods  reputed  golden  in  the  history  of  every  reli- 
gious movement  are  those  early  days  when  pastors  and 
their  people  were  drawn  or  driven  into  intimate  and  heart- 
felt fellowship  with  each  other  either  by  a  community  of 
faith,  love,  hope,  and  aggressive  spiritual  purpose  in  the  one 
case  or  by  hardships,  perils,  poverty,  and  persecution  in 
the  other.  No  page  in  the  history  of  Scotland  is  richer  in 
ideal  characters,  in  noble  thought  and  feeling,  heroic  be- 
havior, and  romantic  incident  than  that  which  chronicles 
the  story  of  the  Solemn  League  and  Covenant.  The 
Quakers  of  to-day,  with  all  their  increased  wealth  and 
refinement,  do  not  appeal  to  the  deeper  religious  sentiment 
and  compel  the  moral  admiration  of  mankind  as  did  their 
fathers  in  the  troubled  days  of  George  Fox  *  and  William 
Penn.  Puritan  and  Pilgrim,  honorably  distinguished  in  the 
early  half  of  the  seventeenth  century  for  their  intense  reli- 
gious earnestness,  keen  spiritual  vision,  and  cherished  sense 
of  the  presence  of  the  Eternal,  were  early  shorn  of  their 
moral  strength  and  grandeur  by  careless  coquetting  with  the 

*  As  Fox  stood  gazing  earnestly  upon  the  people  of  Lancaster  they  cried  out  in  won- 
der, "  Look  at  his  eyes  ;' yet  those  keen  and  piercing  eyes,  as  his  latest  biographer, 
Hodgkin,  notes,  "shed  tears  of  sympathy  with  the  sorrowful,  and  there  was  some- 
thing in  his  face  which  little  children  loved."  "The  wrathful  constable  who  forbade  him 
to  speak  at  Devonshire  House  meeting  was  instantly  quieted  by  his  words  and  the 
gentle  touch  of  his  hand,  and  left  him  respectfully  alone.  The  red-skinned  hunters  in 
Delaware,  very  vaguely  understanding  the  drift  of  his  discourse,  sat  soberly  listening 
with  stately  courtesy. 

"  You  may  break  in  upon  them,"  says  Professor  Masson,  author  of  John  Milton  and 
His  Times,  speaking  of  the  early  Quakers,  "  hoot  at  them,  roarat  them,  drag  them 
about ;  the  meeting,  if  it  is  of  any  size,  essentially  still  goes  on  till  all  the  component 
individuals  are  murdered.  Throw  them  out  at  the  doors  in  twos  and  threes,  and  they 
but  reenter  at  the  windows  and  quietly  resume  their  places.  Pull  their  meeting  house 
down,  and  they  reassemble  next  day  most  punctually  amid  the  broken  walls  and  rafters. 
Shovel  sand  or  earth  down  upon  them,  and  they  still  sit,  a  sight  to  see,  musing  im- 
movably among  the  rubbish." 


294  Ecce  Clerus 

charms  of  the  Philistinian  Delilah.  From  their  colony  of 
Hernhutt  amid  the  forests  of  Lusatia  the  Moravians  a  century 
and  a  half  ago  sent  their  missionaries  to  the  ends  of  the  earth, 
revived  the  dying  fires  of  religion  in  many  Christian  coun- 
tries, and  supplied  materials  for  one  of  the  noblest  and  most 
fascinating  chapters  in  the  history  of  Christian  missions. 
And  Methodism,  whose  founder  always  confessed  to  have 
lit  his  torch  at  the  hearthstone  of  the  Moravians,  presented 
in  its  journals,  biographies,  and  ecclesiastical  chronicles  a 
gallery  of  characters  quite  unique  in  its  variety  and  interest 
before  it  began  to  forget  the  days  of  deep  emotions,  exalted 
aims  and  ideals,  incessant  spiritual  conflict  with  the  devil, 
and  generous  personal  and  pecuniary  sacrifices  for  the  sake 
of  the  sheep  that  are  scattered  abroad  without  a  shepherd. 
*'  Sick  or  well,  I  have  my  daily  labors  to  perform,"  pathetic- 
ally wrote  Asbury,  the  first  bishop  of  the  Methodist  Church, 
in  1807,  as  he  wearily  pushed  forward  to  New  York.  "I 
am  hindered  from  that  solitary,  close,  meditative  commun- 
ion with  God  I  wish  to  enjoy.  I  move  under  great  de- 
bility." Approaching  the  city,  he  says:  "  I  found  old  Grand- 
father Budd  worshiping^  leaning  upon  the  top  of  his  staff — 
halting,  yet  wrestling  like  Jacob.  O  !  we  remember  when 
Israel  [the  Methodist  denomination  in  America]  ivas  a  child, 
but  now,  how  goodly  are  thy  tents,  O  Jacob,  and  thy  taber- 
nacles, O  Israel." 

"Ah  !  what  is  the  toil,"  he  elsewhere  observes,  "of  beating 
over  rocks,  hills,  mountains,  deserts,  five  thousand  miles  a 
year ! — nothing,  when  we  reflect  it  is  done  for  God,  for 
Christ,  for  the  Holy  Spirit,  the  Church  of  God,  the  souls  of 
poor  sinners,  the  preachers  of  the  Gospel  in  seven  Confer- 
ences, one  hundred  and  thirty  thousand  members,  and  one 
or  two  millions  who  congregate  with  us  in  the  solemn  wor- 
ship of  God — O,  it  is  nothing!  "  Making  every  allowance 
for  difference  of  times  and  circumstances,  it  would  perhaps 
be  difficult,  if  not  quite  impossible,  to  duplicate  the  inimi- 


Elements  and  Phases  of  Ministerial  Life      295 

table  pathos  of  the  following  incident  anywhere  in  the  wider 
world  of  present-day  Methodism.  Accompanied  in  his 
tour  through  New  England  in  1807  by  a  preacher  named 
Joseph  Crawford,  as  the  travelers  approached  New  York  city 
it  was  necessary  for  them  to  bid  each  other  farewell.  '*  He 
came  over  the  ferry  with  me,"  says  Asbury.  "When  about 
to  part  he  turned  away  his  face  and  wept.  Ah !  I  am  not 
made  for  such  scenes!  I  felt  exquisite  pain."  "It  is 
a  tendency  of  minds  of  a  superior  order,"  remarks  Dr. 
Stevens,  the  Methodist  historian,  "to  conceal  the  intensity 
of  their  emotions,  but  at  times  the  heart  reveals  itself  in 
spite  of  the  head,  and  the  strong  man  armed  is  found  to 
carry  under  his  cuirass  of  strength  the  sensitive  affections 
of  the  child."  The  truth  is,  in  natures  deeply  religious 
the  Holy  Spirit  gives  every  susceptibility,  faculty,  and 
affection  its  proper  place  and  function,  and  finds  for  each 
a  legitimate  channel  of  expression.  The  natural  enemy  to 
this  liberty  of  the  soul  is  material  prosperity,  with  its  ever- 
multiplying  cares  and  the  worldly  absorption  to  which  it 
ordinarily  leads.  These  tend  to  dry  up  the  fountain  of 
holy  emotion  and  harden  the  feelings.  Luxury  and  ease 
vulgarize  the  mind  by  excluding  its  deepest  and  purest 
experiences.  With  a  few  notable  exceptions  men  who 
acquire  property  grow  temporarily  rich  and  spiritually  and 
eternally  poor  by  a  law  almost  as  steadfast  and  invariable  as 
that  which  governs  the  movements  of  the  stars  or  the  ebb 
and  flow  of  the  tides  of  the  ocean;  and 

111  fares  the  land,  to  hastening  ills  a  prey, 
Where  wealth  accumulates,  and  men  decay. 


296  Ecce  Clerus 


CHAPTER  XIV 
Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene 

'E;j;o;/Ev  6i  rbv  drjaavpbv  tovtov  kv  oaTpadvoig  aiceveaiv. — Si.  Paul. 

J.  Importance  of  Attention  to  Hygiene, 

Though  it  does  not  fall  within  the  scope  of  the  author's 
purpose  to  discuss,  at  any  length,  the  general  question  of 
physical  health  and  exercise,  such  a  task  being  rendered 
wholly  needless  by  the  existence  of  many  works  on  the  sub- 
ject of  acknowledged  merit  and  wide  renown,  yet  since 
bodily  vigor  and  well-developed  physical  powers  are  nowhere 
of  greater  value  or  more  absolute  necessity  than  in  the  labor- 
loving  and  honored  guild  with  which  these  pages  are  con- 
cerned, some  reference  to  clerical  hygiene  may  fairly  claim  a 
place  here. 

It  has  often  been  maintained  by  distinguished  medical  ex- 
perts that  brain-workers  as  a  class  enjoy  advantages  favorable 
to  the  cultivation  of  physical  strength  and  endurance  and  to 
the  extension  of  the  limited  term  of  life  that  are  not  shared  to 
the  same  extent  by  other  men.  "I  have  ascertained,"  says 
an  eminent  physician,*  "  the  longevity  of  five  hundred  of 
the  greatest  men  in  history.  The  list  includes  a  large  pro- 
portion of  the  most  eminent  names  in  all  departments  of 
thought  and  activity.  The  average  of  these  was  64.20." 
Others,  like  Dr.  Madden,  have  made  similar  investigations, 
with  the  result  of  showing  a  yet  longer  average  term  of  life 
of  hard  mental  toilers. 

But  even  still  more  important  than  the  question  of  longev- 
ity as  depending  on  the  physical  condition  is  the  question 
as  to  quality  and  tone  of  life,  and  the  value  of  its  moral  and 

*  Dr.  George  M.  Beard,  of  New  York. 


Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene  297 

intellectual  products  as  influenced  by  the  state  of  bodily 
health,  "  I  compare  the  life  of  the  intellectual,"  says  Hamer- 
ton,  "  to  a  long  wedge  of  gold — the  thin  end  of  it  begins  at 
birth,  and  the  depth  and  value  of  it  go  on  indefinitely  increas- 
ing till  at  last  comes  Death  .  .  .  who  stops  the  auriferous 
processes,  O,  the  mystery  of  the  nameless  ones  who  have 
died  when  the  wedge  was  thin  and  looked  so  poor  and  light ! 
O,  the  happiness  of  the  fortunate  old  man  whose  thoughts 
went  deeper  and  deeper  like  a  wall  that  runs  out  into  the 
sea  ! "  We  may  freely  admit  with  the  same  writer  that  "a 
life  without  suffering  would  be  like  a  picture  without  shade  ;  " 
that  "  the  pets  of  nature  who  do  not  know  what  suffering  is, 
and  cannot  realize  it,  have  always  a  certain  rawness,  like 
foolish  landsmen  who  laugh  at  the  terrors  of  the  ocean,  be- 
cause they  have  neither  experience  enough  to  know  what 
those  terrors  are  nor  brains  enough  to  imagine  them ; "  * 
yet  it  cannot  be  denied  that  the  close  union  and  sympathy 
existing  between  the  material  and  spiritual  parts  of  our  nature 
make  an  afflicted  and  feeble  body  a  hindrance  and  burden 
to  the  soul,  and  therefore  the  minister  who  would  offer  the 
noblest  possible  service  to  his  age  must  keep  "  the  earthen 
vessel "  as  sound  and  strong  as  possible  for  the  sake  of  the 
precious  spiritual  treasure  it  contains. 

2.  Influence  of  Health  on  Character  and  Temperament. 

It  has  not  been  sufficiently  noted  that  apart  altogether  from 
the  character  which  is  the  gradual  and  growing  result  through 
life  of  education,  of  social  environment,  personal  habits,  oc- 
cupation, reading,  study,  and  the  like,  each  individual  has  a 
natural  character  which  is  conferred  exclusively  by  physical 
temperament,  and  the  healthy  or  morbid  manifestations  of 
which  are  determined  largely  by  the  state  of  bodily  health. 
This  subtle  and  potent  factor  of  temperament  is  more  or  less 
present  in  all  mental  and  moral  action,  and  though  it  may 

*  The  Intellectual  Life. 


298  Ecce  Clems 

be  modified,  controlled,  improved,  by  the  presiding  mind,  it 
can  never  be  entirely  suppressed  or  even  materially  changed. 
"  Did  not  daily  experience  bear  out  the  conclusion  that  the 
manifestations  of  rhind  are  influenced  by  different  states  of 
the  body  in  general  and  of  the  brain  in  particular ;  did  we 
not  constantly  see  the  effect  of  various  bodily  changes — of 
the  irritation  of  disease,  of  the  influence  of  medicine,  of  re- 
turning health,  of  advancing  age,  and  of  a  thousand  other 
causes  acting  only  on  the  organ — it  would  be  very  simple 
a  priori  reasoning  that  if  the  brain  be  the  manifesting  organ, 
which  all  admit,  these  manifestations  must  take  a  tinge  from 
the  medium  through  which  they  pass ;  just  as  water,  a  sim- 
ple element,  takes  its  character  from  the  soil  through  which 
it  has  passed ;  or  the  air  becomes  impregnated  with  the 
aroma  of  flowers  or  with  the  various  noxious  exhalations ;  or 
as  the  rapidity  of  a  current  is  influenced  by  the  nature  of  its 
banks,  the  declivity  of  the  country  through  which  it  passes, 
the  obstacles  it  encounters,  and  a  thousand  other  circum- 
stances, permanent  or  accidental."* 

3.  The  Inner  World  of  Thought  and  Feeling  Acted  on  by  the  Outer 
World. 

So  far,  therefore,  as  the  expression  of  thought,  feeling,  and 
purpose  is  influenced  by  physical  temperament  it  is  placed 
under  the  control  of  physical  laws.  At  this  point  we  stand, 
as  moral  and  intelligent  beings,  in  living  contact  with  the 
outer  world  and  occupy  common  ground  with  the  rest  of  the 
animal  creation.  We  are  subject  to  physical  stitnuli  from 
within  and  from  without,  as  well  as  influenced  by  moral 
motives.  All  the  raw  material  of  knowledge  as  well  as  those 
appeals  that  test,  exercise,  develop,  and  strengthen  the  moral 
principles  come  to  us  from  that  cosmic  panorama  which,  with 
its  thousand  objects,  animate  and  inanimate,  is  ever  moving 
before  our  wakeful  senses,  but  beyond  whose  sensuous  rep- 

♦  Newnham's  Reciprocal  Influence  o/ Body  and  Mind,  p.  io8. 


Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene  299 

resentations  we  are  powerless  to  penetrate,  and  our  utter 
ignorance  of  whose  substratum  we  conceal  by  calling  it  the 
material  world.  "  The  whole  mass  of  what  may  be  called 
human  knowledge  (that  is,  of  those  objects  and  facts  respect- 
ing which  the  mind  has  clear,  perfect,  and  satisfactory  per- 
ceptions) is  limited  to  the  evidence  of  the  senses,  and  even 
the  purest  branch  of  it,  geometrical  and  mathematical  truth, 
rests  ultimately  on  material  ideas,  on  forms  and  qualities 
suggested  by  impressions  made  on  the  organs  of  sensation. 
The  moment  we  dismiss  these  palpable  guides  to  what  is 
real  and  true  we  get  within  the  confines  of  uncertainty.  The 
regions  of  abstraction  may  be  delightful,  but  they  are  a  land 
of  shadows  filled  by  forms  without  substance  and  appear- 
ances destitute  of  actual  existence.  The  honest  though  hu- 
miliating fact  is  that,  laying  aside  those  truths  which  are 
revealed  to  us  by  God  in  his  own  sacred  word,  we  have  no 
perfect  knowledge  here  below  of  anything  that  lies  beyond 
the  limits  of  matter.  All  the  attainments  and  all  the  powers 
which  distinguish  the  most  humble  from  the  loftiest  mind, 
the  result  of  scientific  research  and  the  deepest  knowledge 
of  the  facts,  the  combinations  of  genius,  and  the  creations  of 
fancy  are  originally  derived  through  the  medium  of  the  senses, 
and  depend  on  the  more  or  less  perfect  and  delicate  confor- 
mation and  condition  of  the  material  part  of  our  frame  .  .  . 
the  fountain  from  which  they  spring  and  the  channel  through 
which  they  flow."* 

With  this  view  of  man's  intellectual  constitution  and  rela- 
tion to  the  world  of  ideas  the  advocate  of  the  transcenden- 
tal philosophy  can  hardly  be  expected  to  agree.  Yet  it  is 
always  likely  to  be  a  popular  view,  inasmuch  as  it  offers  an 
explanation  of  the  genesis  of  human  knowledge  and  of  the 
nature  of  mental  phenomena  more  in  harmony  with  unsophis- 
ticated common  sense,  and  more  acceptable  to  the  average 
mind  than  any  other.     And  if  this  doctrine  of  man's  rela- 

*  Warner's  TAe  A  nti-Materialist. 


300  Ecce  Clerus 

tion,  as  an  intelligent  being,  to  the  material  universe  has  any 
truth  in  it,  it  is  difficult  to  overrate  the  importance  of  main- 
taining in  a  sound  and  healthy  condition  that  department  of 
his  bodily  nature — the  nervous  system — which  forms  the 
borderland  or  meeting  place  between  the  moral  and  the 
physical,  spirit  and  matter,  heaven  and  earth.  So  far  from 
being  a  point  of  second  or  third  rate  consequence,  the  grav- 
est moral  problems  are  really  involved  for  the  individual  in 
the  question  of  personal  health  and  hygiene,  and  for  the 
state  and  municipality  in  the  wider  question  of  public  sani- 
tation. The  human  body  and  soul  are  joined  together  by 
the  Creator  in  an  indissoluble  partnership  and  a  mutual  inter- 
dependence essential  to  the  integrity  and  completeness  of 
our  nature,  and  the  farther  our  civilization  advances  the  more 
complete  this  interdependence  becomes.  "  Under  our  fash- 
ion of  living  the  body  seems  to  require  greater  and  greater 
attention  from  the  mind,  and  the  increasing  mental  strain 
assumed  under  our  restless,  hurrying  life  makes  a  greater 
and  greater  demand  on  the  vitality  of  the  body."  *  "  The 
very  object  of  this  letter,"  says  Philip  Hamerton  in  his  de- 
lightful treatise,  The  Intellectual  Life^  is  to  recommend 
for  intelligent  purposes  the  careful  preservation  of  the  senses 
in  the  freshness  of  their  perfection  ;  and  this  is  altogether 
incompatible  with  every  species  of  excess.  If  you  are  to  see 
clearly  all  your  life,  you  must  not  sacrifice  eyesight  by  over- 
straining it ;  and  the  same  law  of  moderation  is  the  condition 
of  preserving  every  other  faculty.  I  want  you  to  know  the 
exquisite  taste  of  common  dry  bread ;  to  enjoy  the  perfume 
of  a  larchwood  at  a  distance ;  to  feel  delight  when  a  sea 
wave  dashes  over  you.  I  want  your  eye  to  be  so  sensitive 
that  it  shall  discern  the  faintest  tones  of  a  gray  cloud,  and 
yet  so  strong  that  it  shall  bear  to  gaze  on  a  white  one  in  the 
dazzling  glory  of  sunshine.  I  would  have  your  hearing  sharp 
enough  to  detect  the  music  of  the  spheres  if  it  were  but  au- 

♦  E.  Checkley's  Method  of  Physical  Training^  p.  30. 


Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene  301 

dible,  and  yet  your  nervous  system  robust  enough  to  endure 
the  shock  of  the  guns  on  an  ironclad.  To  have  and  keep 
these  powers  we  need  a  firmness  of  self-government  that  is 
rare," 

Physical  hfe  lived  according  to  this  code  would  be  liter- 
ally a  continual  eating,  drinking,  and  breathing  of  vitality 
in  its  purest  form  from  the  fountain  of  universal  life,  in  har- 
mony with  that  ancient  doctrine  of  the  "breath  of  life" 
that  was  breathed  into  man  at  the  beginning  when  *'he  be- 
came a  living  soul  "—a  doctrine,  by  the  way,  which  modern 
materialistic  science  *  has  labored  in  vain  to  supersede  or 
discredit.  "The  most  probable  view,"  says  that  eminent 
English  physician,  Sir  Benjamin  Ward  Richardson,  "  is  that 
we  actually  feed  on  the  vital  force  that  endows  us  with 
mere  motion;  breathe  it  in  the  atmosphere  in  which  the 
force  once  set  in  motion  can  continue  to  be  set  free ;  that 
we  are,  in  fact,  subdued  fires  burning  passively  in  that  in- 
visible envelope,  which  itself  will  not  burn,  but  will  let  us 
burn  with  it." 

4.  Health  and  Longevity  Largely   within  the  Limits  of  Individual 
ControL 

To  many  strong  and  well  persons  health  and  longevity 
seem  to  be  so  much  questions  of  heredity  and  original 
constitution,  and  therefore  matters  so  little  within  the  limits 
of  individual  control,  that  they  feel  justified  in  dismissing 
all  serious  thought  in  regard  to  them  as  far  as  they  are  per- 
sonally concerned.  And  the  fact  that,  while  every  member 
of  the  race  is  inevitably  exposed  to  certain  general  condi- 
tions of  life  on  the  globe  which  are  inimical  to  perfect 
bodily  health,  there  is  yet  an  astonishing  hereditary  wealth 
of  individual  life  in  certain  families^  gives  some  color  of  truth 
to  this  assumption.     "  It  may  be  laid  down  as  a  general  rule," 

*  See  "  Physiological  Consideration  of  Life-Force,"  by  W.  Xavier  Sudduth,  M.D., 
D.D.S.,  in  The  American  System  of  Dentistry^  edited  by  F.  F.  Litch,  M.D.,  vol.  i. 
p.  5". 


302  Ecce  Clerus 

says  Dr.  Richardson,  "  that  certain  external  conditions  of 
life  tend  to  level  the  duration  of  all  lives.  Still,  some  per- 
sons escape  conditions  which  others  do  not  escape.  Why  ? 
To  this  question  I  can  see  but  one  answer,  but  it  is  an 
answer  which  is  every  day  yielded  by  experience  and  ob- 
servation. It  is  that  those  who  escape  longest  the  freedom 
of  external  conditions  telling  against  life  possess  an  equal  bal- 
ance of  good  working  organs  of  the  body,  not  one  of  which  is 
specially  inclined  to  take  on  any  form  of  disease  of  a  par- 
ticular kind,  such  as  tubercle  or  cancer.  The  whole  body, 
therefore,  continues  to  work  in  all  its  parts  in  harmonious 
order  of  function,  and  by  the  steadiness  of  functional  work 
the  continuous  life  is  maintained.  Life,  in  short,  is  main- 
tained by  equality  of  perfection  in  every  organ.  And  this 
is  what  is  really  meant  by  a  good  constitution,  whenever 
that  term  is  correctly  applied.  The  frame  of  the  body 
which  offers  this  goodness  of  constitution  may  be  small ; 
strangely  enough  it  may  even  be  indifferently  developed,  and 
yet,  by  evenly  distributed  soundness  of  organic  parts,  it 
may  continue  in  action  longer  than  a  larger  and  more 
finely  developed  frame  which,  pierced  in  one  vital  organ  by 
disease,  succumbs  beneath  a  single  organic  failure."  * 

This  hereditary  physical  sanity  and  wealth  of  life,  then,  is 
no  mere  accident.  It  is  the  cumulative  result  of  wise  self- 
government,  of  regular  habits,  of  careful  observance  of 
great  hygienic  principles,  extending  back  through  many  gen- 
erations ;  for  in  this  way  the  just  providence  of  God  visits 
the  wisdom  and  virtue  of  '*  the  fathers  upon  the  children 
unto  the  third  and  fourth  generation."  "  I  have  of  late 
years,"  says  the  distinguished  authority  above  quoted, 
"carefully  noticed  the  relationship  of  family  longevity  to 
what  may  be  called  family  individuality,  and  the  fact  I 
have  arrived  at  is  that,  though  individual  vitality  may  run 
through  a  line  of  persons  connected  by  blood  relationship, 

*  Ministry  of  Healthy  p.  159. 


Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene  303 

it  is  not  universal  in  that  series,  but  belongs  only  to  particular 
members  of  it  who  by  their  own  personal  care  or  good  fortune 
conserve  the  vital  endowment  that  has  descended  to  them.  What 
is  more,  I  have  observed  that  the  prolonged  vitality  shown 
by  individuals  is  not  necessarily  connected  with  any  great 
beauty  of  form  or  muscular  power,  or  even  power  of  physical 
endurance.  It  is  connected  rather  with  facility  of  constitu- 
tion to  take  rest,  to  accept  anxiety  with  serenity,  annoyance 
without  passion,  and  success  or  pleasure  without  excitement 
or  overweening  gratification,"  * 

5.  Moral  Value  to  the  Minister  of  Sound  Bodily  Health. 

He,  therefore,  who  would  at  once  acknowledge  his  debt 
of  gratitude  to  a  noble  ancestry  from  whom  he  has  inherited 
that  rarest  and  most  precious  of  all  earthly  possessions — per- 
fect sanity  of  body  and  mind — and  discharge  his  responsi- 
bility to  those  who  in  future  ages  may  **  spring  from  his 
loins,"  will  see  clearly  that  the  supreme  object  to  be  kept  in 
sight  in  all  athletic  exercise  and  hygienic  methods  is  not 
the  temporary  and  abnormal  development  of  certain  organs 
and  functions  of  the  body,  but  the  promotion  and  preserva- 
tion of  a  condition  of  sound  general  health.  And  this, 
which  is  a  matter  of  incalculable  importance  to  men  in  all 
professions  and  pursuits,  is  especially  so  to  the  clergyman 
of  this  busy  and  exacting  age.  His  physical  condition 
affects  his  work  in  its  quality  and  tone  for  good  or  evil  at 
every  point — in  the  pulpit,  in  the  study,  by  the  bedside  of 
the  sick,  in  the  home  made  sad  by  temporal  misfortune  or 
desolate  by  death,  among  the  select  circle  of  friends  at  a 
marriage  ceremony,  or  in  the  ordinary  social  gatherings  of 
his  people.  In  all  these  spheres  a  superabundant  physical 
vitality,  supporting  and  stimulating  an  alert,  cheerful,  care- 
fully cultivated  mind,  acts  like  sunshine  on  all  around  him, 
while  a  timid,  retiring  manner  or  a  morbid  and  melancholy 

♦  Ministry  of  Healthy  p.  170. 


304  Ecce  Clems 

temperament — usually  the  result  of  overstrained  and  de- 
pressed nerves — irritates  and  repels  the  inconsiderate,  and 
awakens  feelings  of  pain  or  pity  in  gentler  and  kindlier  souls. 
The  present  writer  has  few  more  painful  recollections  than 
that  of  hearing  one  of  the  most  excellent  of  men — an  able 
preacher,  a  devout  and  successful  pastor,  deservedly  high 
in  the  esteem  and  appreciation  of  his  people — ask  at  the 
weekly  prayer  meeting,  in  reference  to  some  words  which 
he  feared  might  have  given  offense,  to  be  forgiven  and  ex- 
cused for  uttering  them,  on  the  ground  that  they  were  spoken 
in  a  moment  of  excessive  nervous  excitability.  He  has  since 
been  obliged  to  retire  from  the  work  he  so  much  loved. 

It  is  altogether  inexcusable,  at  this  late  day,  when  every- 
thing relating  to  the  moral,  social,  industrial,  and  sanitary 
well-being  of  the  people  is  eagerly  discussed,  when  the  royal 
road  to  health  and  happiness  is  neither  hard  to  find  nor  dif- 
ficult to  follow,  that  any  man  should  be  so  far  behind  his 
age  as  to  imperil  health,  moral  reputation,  and  professional 
efficiency  by  obvious  hygienic  error.  And  yet  not  a  few 
men  who  begin  their  ministerial  career  with  a  fair  amount 
of  bodily  vigor,  with  brilliant  intellectual  gifts  and  well- 
trained  powers,  with  high  moral  ideals  and  purposes,  and  with 
the  confidence  and  good  will,  withal,  of  a  large  circle  of  admir- 
ing friends,  become  by  overwork  and  worry,  or  by  neglect  of 
the  simplest  laws  of  health,  the  victims  of  physical  decay, 
the  prey  of  various  nervous  maladies,  of  fits  of  melancholy 
and  mental  depression,  of  misgivings  and  miseries,  doubts^ 
and  fears — of  a  species  of  mental  and  moral  decrepitude,  in 
a  word,  almost  more  to  be  dreaded  than  the  "  seven  last 
plagues  " — long  before  their  sun  has  reached  the  meridian! 

6.  Notable  Instances  of  Early  Physical  Breakdown. 

From  the  days  of  the  apostle  Paul,  whose  thorn  in  the 
flesh — whatever  it  may  have  been — became  as  the  angel  of 
Satan  sent  to  humiliate  and  harass  him,  down  to  the  latest 


Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene  305 

young  clergyman  of  promise  who  died  within  the  first  decade 
of  a  brilliant  and  powerful  ministry  because  he  imagined  he 
could  not  spare  the  time  or  take  the  trouble  to  "  learn  to 
breathe  " — having  been  breathing  very  well  all  his  life — there 
are  few  things  more  painful  to  contemplate  than  the  early 
impairment  or  untimely  termination  of  the  work  of  great  and 
serviceable  souls.  "  Perhaps  I  might  have  lasted  longer  had 
I  leaned  my  back  against  a  tree,"  was  the  pathetic  exclama- 
tion as  he  lay  dying,  a  little  over  fifty  years  of  age,  of  one  of 
the  most  devoted  and  most  successful  of  the  men  for  whose 
fruitful  labors  and  far-reaching  influence  for  good  the  world 
is  indebted  to  the  astute  ecclesiastical  statesmanship  and 
organizing  genius  of  the  founder  of  Methodism.  And  yet 
no  one  who  reads  with  discrimination  the  interesting  record 
of  the  herculean  labors  of  that  most  saintly  and  most  unself- 
ish man  can  fail  to  see  that  it  was  not  so  much  occasional 
rest  that  was  needed  as  a  little  more  careful  observance  of 
the  obvious  limits  of  human  endurance  and  of  the  inviolable 
laws  of  health.  Admire  as  we  may  the  lofty  aims,  the  self- 
consuming  zeal,  the  splendid  success,  of  Xavier  in  the  Ori- 
ent, one  cannot  but  regret  that  the  fine  spiritual  instinct  that 
led  to  a  complete  surrender  of  "  his  heart  to  the  Purifier 
and  his  will  to  him  who  governs  the  universe  "  did  not  pre- 
vent him  from  imagining  that  verminous  bodily  filth  was  an 
essential  element  of  Christian  humility  and  self-mortification. 
As  Sir  James  Stephens  observes,  Xavier's  faith  "  bade  him 
look  on  this  fair  world  as  on  some  dungeon  unvisited  by  the 
breath  of  heaven.  ...  At  her  voice  he  starved  and  lacer- 
ated his  body,  and  rivaled  the  meanest  lazar  in  filth  and 
wretchedness."*  He  perished  on  the  shore  of  Siam  even 
more  a  martyr  to  dirt  and  disease  than  to  his  zeal  for  the 
salvation  of  the  heathen,  great  as  that  was.  Nor  with  all  one's 
reverence  for  the  extraordinary  abilities  and  exalted  charac- 
ter of  the  man  who  **  by  his  labors  as  a  translator  placed 

*  Ignatius  Loyola  and  his  Associates, 

20 


306  Ecce  Clems 

portions  of  the  Scriptures  within  the  reach  of  all  who  could 
read  over  one  fourth  of  the  habitable  globe,"  can  one's  calm 
and  discriminating  judgment  approve  of  Henry  Martyn's 
prodigal  expenditure  of  strength  amid  the  perils  of  a  climate 
for  which,  at  the  outset,  his  friends  thought  his  frail  frame 
totally  unsuited.*  And  who  can  listen  to  the  cry  of  David 
Brainerd  as  he  kneels  in  his  solitary  hut  amid  the  primeval 
forests  that  flanked  the  Susquehanna  and  Delaware  Rivers 
in  his  day — *'  O,  that  I  were  a  flame  of  fire  in  the  Lord's 
service ; "  "  O,  that  I  were  pure  spirit,  that  I  might  be 
active  for  God  " — without  feeling  that  it  is  the  aspiration  of 
one  whose  zeal  o'erleaps  the  limits  of  nature,  and  that  the 
style  of  self-sacrifice  to  which  it  leads,  though  morally  grand, 
is  physically  considered  only  a  thinly  disguised  suicide  ? 
There  is  an  expressible  and  yet  characteristic  pathos  in 
Brainerd's  last  words,  when,  at  the  early  age  of  twenty-eight, 
worn  out  by  sickness,  solitude,  morbid  introspection,  and 
frequent  exposure  to  midnight  damps  by  sleeping  in  trees  or 
by  a  fire  of  pine  logs  in  the  open  forest,  he  exclaimed,  just 
before  closing  his  eyes  on  all  mortal  scenes  at  the  house  of 
Jonathan  Edwards,  in  Northampton,  "  Why  tarry  the  wheels 
of  his  chariot?  Why  is  his  chariot  so  long  in  coming?" 
The  sword  of  the  soul  was  sharp  and  cut  its  way,  untimely, 
through  the  too  slender  scabbard.  Hooker's  Ecclesiastical 
Polity  will  probably  be  read  for  its  sublime  thought,  its  calm 
and  dignified  argument,  and  not  least  for  its  melodious  and 
majestic  English  as  long  as  the  delay  of  judgment  fires  per- 
mits the  existence  of  a  record,  and  yet  the  gifted  author  died 
at  foyty-seven,  leaving  his  work  unfinished — a  sacrifice  to 
excessive  toil,  domestic  worry,  and  want  of  bodily  care,  f 

♦  It  IS  a  curious  illustration  how  quickly  and  deeply  noble  natures  become  inoculated 
with  the  spirit  of  moral  heroism  that  it  was  Martyn's  hearing,  while  a  snident  at  Cam- 
bridge, Charles  Simeon  speak  of  the  great  good  accomplished  by  William  Carey  in 
India  that  decided  his  remarkable  career  and  pathetic  fate. 

t  "  Bent  by  the  influence  of  sedentary  and  meditative  habits,  of  quiet  and  retiring 
manners,  discolored  in  complexion,  and  worn  and  marked  in  feature  from  the  hard 
mental  toil  which  he  had  expended  in  his  great  work,"  is  in  substance  Walton's  descrip- 
tion of  Hooker's  personal  appearance. 


Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene  307 

Bunyan  had  hardly  become  known  as  a  popular  writer  and 
powerful  preacher  to  the  thoughtful  religious  public  of  his 
day  when  a  cold  caught  during  a  journey  on  horseback  in 
the  rain,  between  Reading  and  London,  brought  his  labors 
to  a  premature  conclusion.  Though  the  great  dreamer's 
enforced  confinement  in  that  foul  pigsty  of  a  prison,  which 
some  curious  official  whim  had  perched  on  a  pier  of  the 
bridge  across  the  sleepy  Ouse  at  Bedford,  gave  him  an  oppor- 
tunity of  producing  one  of  the  few  imperishable  gems  of  lit- 
erature, the  England  of  his  day  paid  dearly  for  those  years 
of  hardship  and  physical  wear  and  waste  in  the  shortening 
of  one  of  the  noblest  and  most  exemplary  of  lives. 

The  frail  and  sickly  Baxter  would  undoubtedly  have  been 
a  healthier  man  and  probably  a  longer  liver — though  as  it 
was  he  reached  his  seventy-sixth  year — if  in  place  of  poring 
incessantly  over  the  yellow  pages  of  the  schoolmen  of  which 
he  was  inordinately  fond,  and  producing  copy  for  the 
printers  by  the  yard,  he  had  oftener  walked  abroad  and 
sought  more  frequent  communion  with  that  wholesome  gen- 
ius of  the  universe  of  which  Wordsworth  has  given  so  fine  a 
description  in  his  well-known  poem  composed  on  the  beauti- 
ful banks  of  the  Wye  : 

For  I  have  learned 
To  look  on  nature,  not  as  in  the  hour 
Of  thoughtless  youth,  but  hearing  oftentimes 
The  still  sad  music  of  humanity, 
Not  harsh,  nor  grating,  though  of  ample  power 
To  chasten  and  subdue.     And  I  have  felt 
A  spirit  which  disturbs  me  with  the  joy 
Of  elevated  thoughts  ;  a  sense  sublime 
Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused, 
"Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns, 
And  the  round  ocean,  and  the  living  air,  t 

And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man  : 
A  motion  and  a  spirit  that  impels 
All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought, 
And  rolls  through  all  things. 

One  cannot  help  recognizing  the  moral  heroism  of  George 
Whitefield  when  a  few  weeks  before  the  sudden  termination 


308  Ecce  Clems 

of  his  wonderfully  successful  ministry  in  the  flower  of  his 
manhood  he  reflects,  "  It  is  the  seventy-fifth  day  since  I 
arrived  at  Rhode  Island,  exceeding  weak  in  body ;  yet  God 
has  enabled  me  to  preach  a  hundred  and  seventy-five  times  in 
public,  besides  exhorting  frequently  in  private."  *  And  yet  our 
admiration  does  not  blind  us  to  the  enormity  and  imprudence 
of  this  riotous  expenditure  of  strength — this  burning  of  the 
candle  at  both  ends.  If  Robert  Hall,  whose  admirers  were 
wont  to  call  him  the  "prince  of  preachers,"  had  studied  his 
body  and  "  its  needs  with  a  tithe  the  masterly  skill  and  acute- 
ness  he  displayed  in  analyzing  the  nature  and  phenomena  of 
the  soul,  and  pointing  out  its  imperative  and  imperishable 
requirements  to  his  delighted  contemporaries ;  and  if  he 
had  striven  to  avoid  pain  with  half  the  force  of  will  he  dis- 
played in  enduring  and  suppressing  it,  he  would  have  served 
his  generation  no  less  brilliantly,  but  with  less  of  physical 
torture  and  for  a  longer  time.  It  is  positively  humiliating 
to  find  a  man  of  Hall's  imperial  mold,  with  "a  countenance," 
as  John  Foster  remarked,  *'  formed  as  if  on  purpose  for  the 
most  declared  manifestation  of  power,"  the  helpless  slave  of 
tobacco.  Of  Thomas  Walsh,  who  died  at  twenty-eight,  one  of 
the  most  accomplished  Hebrew  scholars  and  ablest  preachers 
of  his  day  ;  of  John  Summerfield,  whose  pulpit  eloquence 
and  power  made  him  famous  among  the  people  of  his  own 
denomination — the  Methodists — in  England,  France,  and 
America  before  he  was  twenty-seven,  at  which  age  he  died  ; 
of  the  younger  Treff'ry,  whose  masterly  exposition  of  the 
eternal  sonship  of  Christ  has  won  for  him  an  enduring  place 
among  the  distinguished  theologians  of  Christendom  ;  of 
Frederick  William  Robertson,  whose  heroic  but  unavailing 
struggle  for  a  few  brief  but  brilliant  years  with  shattered 
health  and  the  burden  of  public  duty  Stopford  Brooke  has 

♦To  form  a  due  estimate  of  these  exertions  it  is  necessary  to  remember  this  sick  man 
was  a  vehement  and  highly  dramatic  speaker,  and  often  preached  over  an  hour  to  a 
crowd  of  many  thousands  in  the  open  air,  and  that  hb  private  exhortations  were  often 
as  long  as  many  sermons  in  our  day. 


Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene  309 

made  known  to  the  world  in  the  Life  and  Letters  oi  ih.Q  great 
Brighton  preacher;  of  Alfred  Cookman,  whose  saintly  char- 
acter and  consecrated  labors  as  portrayed  by  Ridgway  have 
been  an  inspiration  and  a  canon  of  good  living  to  many 
young  clergymen — of  these  and  others  we  can  only  say  with 
regret  that  the  larger  and  completer  fulfillment  of  the  splen- 
did promise  they  gave  was  prevented  only  by  those  twin 
conspirators  which  have  so  often  been  fatal  to  the  aspirations 
of  noble  minds,  overwork,  inducing  close  sedentary  habit, 
and  inattention  to  the  laws  of  health.  The  varied  and  ex- 
hausting labors  of  Thomas  Chalmers  at  St.  John's,  Glasgow, 
would  have  broken  him  down  at  forty-three  if  he  had  not 
escaped  in  time  to  the  chair  of  moral  philosophy  in  the  Uni- 
versity of  St.  Andrew's.  "When  a  specialist  in  diseases  of 
the  nervous  system  takes  up  the  biography  of  that  gifted 
man,  Austin  Phelps,  he  reads  between  the  lines  the  causes 
of  his  breakdown,  and  feels  that  such  a  choice  spirit  ought  to 
have  been  saved  those  last  twenty  years  of  pathetic  exclu- 
sion from  public  service."*  Nor  can  it  be  denied  that 
Spurgeon  might  still  have  been  living  to  awaken  weekly  in 
the  hearts  of  the  thousands  of  every  land  the  familiar  senti- 
ment of  the  prophet,  "  How  beautiful  upon  the  mountains 
are  the  feet  of  him  that  bringeth  good  tidings,"  etc.;  might 
still  have  drawn  upon  himself  from  the  lips  of  orphan  chil- 
dren and  hoary  saints  and  students  learning  under  his  inspir- 
ing example  the  divine  art  of  "  speaking  the  truth  in  love  " — 
the  benediction  that  greeted  the  patriarch  of  the  desert — 
*'  When  the  eye  saw  me,  then  it  blessed  me;  and  when  the  ear 
heard  me,  it  gave  witness  to  me:  because  I  delivered  the  poor 
that  cried,  and  the  fatherless,  and  him  that  had  none  to  help 
him,"  and  might  still  have  fed  and  sustained  the  pure  flame 
of  evangelical  truth  and  piety  throughout  the  world  if  he 
had  never  entertained  the  foolish  dream — very  foolish  for 
such  a  remarkable  condensation  and  crystallization  of  com- 

*  George  F.  Streeter,  in  Consregationalist.,  August,  1894. 


310  Ecce  Clerus 

mon  sense — of  "smoking  cigars  to  the  glory  of  God;  "*  if 
he  had  claimed,  in  a  word,  more  leisure  for  physical  relax- 
ation, and  had  observed  from  the  first  simpler  and  wiser 
rules  of  living. 

7.  Necessity  of  Regular  and  Systematic  Exercise. 

Since  the  physical  constitution,  as  well  as  the  circum- 
stances, habits,  and  tastes  of  clergymen  are  necessarily 
varied,  it  is  impossible  to  lay  down  hygienic  laws  which 
shall  be  applicable  to  all.  There  is,  however,  one  necessity 
which  is  sovereign,  absolute,  universal,  and  that  is  regular 
and  systematic  exercise  of  some  kind.  A  Venetian  vase,  made 
of  the  thinnest  glass  ever  manufactured,  has  been  known 
to  exist  uninjured  for  five  hundred  years  with  proper  care, 
and  the  frail  earthen  vessel  in  which  God  has  been  pleased 
to  deposit  an  invaluable  heavenly  treasure  may  be  pre- 
served in  a  fair  measure  of  health  and  vigor  for  the  longest 
period  allotted  by  nature  to  the  life  of  man  with  ordinary 
prudence,  and  an  hour  spent  every  day  in  the  active  use  of 
limbs  and  lungs  in  the  open  air.  Every  Christian  student 
and  preacher  needs  to  believe  as  firmly  in  the  necessity 
of  out-door  exertion  as  in  the  articles  of  the  Apostles' 
Creed.  The  conviction  requires  to  be  as  imperious  as 
hunger  or  thirst  or  the  necessity  for  sleep,  and  potent 
enough  to  drive  the  victim  of  an  overstudious  and  inactive 
disposition  out  of  the  house  regardless  of  pressure  of  work, 
personal  mood,  or  unpropitious  weather.  The  "bodily 
exercise"  (auifiaTiKT)  yviivaaia)^  whose  "profit  "  seems  to  be 
"  little  "  when  compared  with  the  larger  advantage  of  the 
"  devoutness "  which  extends  to  all  things  and  all  times, 
is  really  a  great  investment  when  one  considers  its  effect 
on   the    whole   cycle   of  man's    physical    and    intellectual 

*  In  less  than  three  months  after  Dr.  G.  F.  Pentecost,  preaching  in  Spurgeon's  Taber- 
nacle in  Mr.  Spurgeon's  presence,  provoked  from  the  great  Baptist  pastor  this  strange 
defense  of  his  smoking  habit  before  his  vast  congregation,  the  writer  met  a  boy  in  the 
street,  whom  he  highly  esteemed,  with  a  pipe  in  his  mouth,  and  on  his  expressing  regret 
was  told  with  an  air  of  triumph  that  Mr,  Spurgeon  smoked  "  to  the  glory  of  God.'* 


Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene  311 

existence.  In  any  case,  a  religion  which  impressively 
reminds  us  that  the  body  is  "the  temple  of  the  Holy 
Ghost "  cannot  withhold  its  solemn  sanction  from  the  use 
of  timely  and  legitimate  measures  fitted  to  maintain  that 
temple  in  good  repair.  "  A  person  naturally  robust,  with  a 
clear  and  powerful  brain,  could  bear  twelve  or  fourteen 
hours*  work  every  day  for  years  together,  so  far  as  the  work 
itself  is  concerned,  if  only  so  large  an  expenditure  of  time 
left  a  sufficient  margin  for  exercise  and  sleep.  But  the 
privation  of  exercise,  by  weakening  the  digestive  and  as- 
similative powers,  reduces  the  flow  of  healthy,  rich  blood 
to  the  brain — the  brain  requires  an  enormous  quantity 
of  blood,  especially  when  the  cerebral  matter  is  rapidly 
destroyed  by  intellectual  labor — and  usually  brings  on 
nervousness,  the  peculiar  affliction  of  the  overdriven 
mental  laborer.  This  nervousness  is  nature's  kindly  warn- 
ing, preserving  us,  if  we  attend  to  it  in  time,  from  much 
more  serious  consequences.  The  best  preventive  of  it,  and 
often  the  only  cure,  is  plenty  of  moderate  exercise." 

8.  Benefits  Secured  Amply  Compensate  for  Cost  in  Time. 

Perhaps  the  consideration  that  militates  most  powerfully 
against  the  adoption  and  observance  of  judicious  rules  of 
hygienic  and  health-preserving  exertion  is  a  conscientious 
but  short-sighted  begrudgment  of  the  time  required.  It  is 
difficult  to  believe,  especially  when  important  business  is 
absorbing  attention,  that  one  can  reap  any  benefit  from  a 
long  walk  in  the  open  air  at  all  proportioned  to  the  sacrifice 
demanded.  Influenced  by  this  scruple,  busy  men  of  all 
professions  use  various  expedients  to  concentrate  the 
benefits  of  bodily  recreation  into  as  small  a  space  and  as 
convenient  a  form  as  possible.  The  age  is  preeminently 
one  of  concentration,  distillation,  and  dispatch,  and  so 
these  time-saving  experiments  often  take  the  form  of  some 
violent  muscular  exertion  which  can  be  gone  through  in  a 


312  Ecce  Clerus 

few  minutes.  A  moment's  reflection,  however,  will  con- 
vince any  person  of  ordinary  intelligence  that  it  is  impos- 
sible to  secure  the  cooperation  of  nature  in  small,  picayune 
economies  of  that  kind.  To  no  one  who  hesitates  to  pay 
the  price  she  demands  will  she  surrender  the  golden  secret 
of  physical  health  and  happiness.  Her  processes  are  broad, 
liberal,  and  unhurried,  and  in  the  building  up  of  the 
physique,  as  well  as  in  development  and  growth  of  the 
mind,  time  is  a  large  factor.  "  It  is  necessary,"  aptly  re- 
marks a  recent  writer,  "  to  live  with  a  study  for  hundreds  or 
thousands  of  hours  before  the  mind  can  assimilate  as  much 
of  the  subject  as  it  may  need,  and  so  it  is  necessary  to  live 
in  exercise  during  a  thousand  hours  of  every  year  to  make 
sure  of  the  physical  benefits.  Even  the  fresh  air  itself  re- 
quires time  to  renovate  our  blood.  The  fresh  air  cannot 
be  concentrated,  and  to  breathe  the  prodigious  quantities  of 
it  which  are  needed  for  perfect  energy  we  must  be  out  in 
it  frequently  and  long."  As  John  Wesley  entered  upon  his 
eighty-third  year  he  wrote,  "  I  am  never  tired,  neither  with 
riding,  preaching,  nor  traveling  ;  one  natural  cause,  un- 
doubtedly, is  my  continual  exercise  and  change  of  air." 

The  time-economizing  theory  is  founded  on  a  narrow 
and  inadequate  estimate  of  the  cumulative  and  many-sided 
good  which  accrues  from  systematic  physical  exertion  in 
the  open  air,  and  is  a  profound  mistake.  The  competence 
of  the  human  brain  for  any  intellectual  task,  as  well  as  the 
excellence  and  value  of  its  products,  depends  on  the 
amount  of  physical  energy  and  endurance  it  can  command. 
It  goes  without  saying  that  the  complex  and  curious  ma- 
chinery of  thought  works  more  smoothly  and  to  better  pur- 
pose in  a  condition  of  perfect  health  than  when  handi- 
capped by  the  misgivings  and  miseries  of  disease.  And 
though  a  man  may  retain  his  bodily  vigor  and  keep  his 
intellect  in  good  working  order  for  months  together  without 
an   hour's    out-door  recreation,   so  that    the   time   which 


Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene  313 

would  have  been  given  to  exercise  would  seem  to  be  so 

much  clear  loss  for  the  period  designated,  yet  it  is  certain 

that  the  experiment,  if  extended  through  the  labors  of  a 

lifetime,    would   prove  disastrous.     Physically,   as   well   as 

morally,  it  is  true  that 

Our  deeds  still  travel  with  us  from  afar, 

And  what  we  have  been  makes  us  what  we  are. 

And  a  body  toughened  and  toned  up  by  daily  exposure  to 
summer  air  and  sunshine,  and  winter's  storm  and  tempest, 
until  it  becomes  a  magazine  of  health  and  energy  for  years 
to  come,  is,  as  a  rule,  essential  to  the  successful  accomplish- 
ment of  any  considerable  intellectual  enterprise,  and  the 
periodical  sacrifice  of  time  to  one's  physical  well-being  is 
found  in  the  end  to  be  a  commendable  exhibition  of  fore- 
thought and  farsightedness,  and  a  policy  every  way  worthy 
of  a  rational  being. 

9.  Errors  to  be  Shunned. 

But  this  mistaken  parsimony  as  to  time  is  not  the  only 
error  to  be  avoided.  Eager  and  tenacious  minds  are  apt 
to  trail  after  them  when  they  leave  the  study  the  chain  of 
thought  that  absorbed  and  enslaved  them  there.  It  is 
requisite  not  only  to  acquire  the  power  of  completely  dis- 
engaging the  mind  from  the  problem  with  which  it  has 
immediately  been  contending,  but  to  allow  no  other  involv- 
ing mental  labor  to  take  its  place.  The  respite  of  the  brain 
should  be  as  absolute  and  unbroken  as  possible.  "  The 
fatal  law  of  the  studious  temperament,"  says  a  close  ob- 
server of  student  life,  "  is  that  in  exercise  itself  it  must  find 
some  intellectual  charm,  so  that  we  quit  our  books  in  the 
library  only  to  go  and  read  the  infinite  book  of  nature.  We 
cannot  go  out  in  the  country  without  incessantly  thinking 
about  either  botany  or  geology  or  landscape  painting,  and 
it  is  difficult  for  us  to  find  a  refuge  from  the  importunate 
habit  of  investigation.  .  .  .  There  is  no  position  in  the  world 


314  Ecce  Clerus 

more  wearisome  than  that  of  the  man  who  is  inwardly  in- 
different to  the  amusement  in  which  he  is  trying  to  take  part." 
Another  common  mistake  which  claims  a  brief  word  of 
mention  here  is  the  prevalent  habit  of  overclothing  in 
summer.  "  The  most  effectual  device,"  says  Dr.  Felix  L. 
Oswald,  for  diminishing  the  benefit  of  outdoor  exercise 
"  in  warm  weather  is  a  heavy  suit  of  clothes.  Between 
May  and  October  man  has  to  wear  clothes  enough  to  keep 
the  flies  and  gnats  from  troubling  him  ;  a  pair  of  linen 
trousers,  a  shirt,  and  light  neckerchief — whatsoever  is  more 
than  these  is  of  evil.  The  best  headdress  for  summer  is 
our  natural  hair  ;  the  next  best  is  a  light  straw  hat  with  a 
perforated  crown.  Hats  and  caps  as  protection  from  the 
vicissitudes  of  the  atmosphere  are  a  comparatively  recent 
invention.  The  Syrians,  Greeks,  Romans,  Normans,  and 
Visigoths  wore  helmets  in  war,  but  went  uncovered  in  time 
of  peace  in  the  coldest  and  most  stormy  seasons ;  the  Gauls 
and  Egyptians  always  went  bareheaded,  even  in  battle,  and 
a  hundred  years  after  the  conquest  of  Egypt  by  Cam- 
byses  (B.  C.  525)  the  sands  of  Pelusium  still  covered  the 
well-preserved  skulls  of  the  native  warriors,  while  those  of 
the  turbaned  Persians  had  crumbled  to  the  jawbones.  The 
Emperor  Hadrian  traveled  bareheaded  from  the  icy  Alps  to 
the  borders  of  Mesopotamia  ;  the  founders  of  several  mon- 
astic orders  interdicted  all  coverings  for  the  head;  during 
the  reign  of  Henry  VIH  boys  and  young  men  generally 
went  with  the  head  bare,  and  to  the  preservation  of  this 
old  Saxon  custom  Sir  John  Sinclair  ascribes  the  remarkable 
health  of  the  orphans  of  the  Queen's  Hospital."  The  human 
skull  is  naturally  better  protected  than  that  of  any  other  warm- 
blooded animal,  so  that  there  seems  little  need  of  adding 
an  artificial  covering;  and,  as  Dr.  Adair  observes,  the  most 
neglected  children,  street  Arabs  and  young  gypsies,  arc 
least  liable  to  disease  chiefly  because  they  are  not  guarded 
from  the  access  of  fresh  air  by  too  many  garments.  .  .  .  The 


Ministerial  Health  and  Hygiene  315 

trouble  is  that  so  many  of  our  latter-day  health  codes  are 
framed  by  men  who  mistake  the  exigencies  of  their  own 
decrepitude  for  the  normal  condition  of  mankind. 

JO.  Physical  Gifts  and  Graces  Not  to  be  Despise<L 

The  physical  gifts  of  God  are  no  more  to  be  despised 
and  neglected  than  intellectual  talent  or  moral  or  educa- 
tional advantages.  And  the  bearing  of  the  whole  question 
of  hygiene  and  exercise  on  the  highest  ministerial  efficiency 
and  success  is  too  obvious  to  need  insisting  on.  Health, 
strength,  cheerfulness,  ample  nervous  energy,  complete  self- 
command,  ease  and  grace  of  public  attitude,  even  a  tall, 
commanding  form,  when  crowned  with  a  duly  disciplined 
and  powerful  intellect,  all  contribute  in  their  way  elements 
of  force  and  value  to  the  public  man's  position,  to  the 
pastor's  success,  to  the  preacher's  message.  If,  as  the  al- 
most forgotten  author  of  the  once  popular  "  Night  Thoughts  " 
reminds  us,  "  the  Christian  is  the  highest  style  of  man,"  the 
observation  ought  to  apply  with  double  force  and  wider 
comprehensiveness  to  the  Christian  preacher.  In  body,  as 
in  intellect  and  character,  he  should  seek  conformity  to  the 
highest  type.  It  has,  perhaps,  been  too  much  the  fashion 
to  exalt  the  intellectual  and  the  spiritual  at  the  expense  of 
the  physical.  Byron,  who  was  physically  deformed,  said 
bitterly  of  men  of  stately  stature,  for  example  : 

Tall  men  are  oft  like  houses  that  are  tall, 
The  upper  rooms  are  furnished  worst  of  all. 

But  the  present  writer  has  noted  that  many  of  the  princes 
of  platform  and  pulpit  oratory,  in  all  lands,  whom  he  has 
been  privileged  to  hear  are  men  of  tall  and  well-proportioned 
physique,  and  he  does  not  hesitate  to  say  that  if  the  bright- 
ness and  clearness  of  the  lamp  of  mercy  held  forth  by  them 
were  not  enhanced  by  the  majesty  of  their  personal  presence, 
which  may  be  cordially  conceded,  they  certainly  were  not 
diminished  on  that  account. 


316  £cce  Clems 


CHAPTER  XV 
The  Minister  in  Agfe^  Retirement,  and  Death 

I  love  the  doubt,  the  dark,  the  fear, 
That  still  surroundeth  all  things  here. 

I  love  the  mystery,  nor  seek  to  solve ; 

Content  to  let  the  stars  revolve. 
Nor  ask  to  have  their  meaning  clear. 

Enough  for  me,  enough  to  feel ; 

To  let  the  mystic  shadows  steal 
Into  a  land  whither  I  cannot  follow ; 

To  see  the  stealthy  sunlight  leave 
Dewy  dingle,  dappled  hollow  ; 

To  watch  when  falls  the  hour  of  eve, 
Quiet  shadows  on  a  quiet  hill ; 
To  watch,  to  wonder  and  be  still. 

— Alfred  Austin. 
).  Retirixig  to  the  Shadows. 

In  a  recently  published  novel — The  Story  of  an  Island 
in  the  Northern  Sea — three  mystic  women  sit  upon  the  rocks, 
which  are  covered  with  strange  runic  records  of  prehis- 
toric ages.  All  of  them  are  moved  to  meditation  by  the 
suggestive  scene.  One  of  them  sees  only  the  solemn  end- 
lessness of  life ;  another,  its  trivial  emptiness  ;  a  third,  its 
pathetic  brevity.  These  aspects  of  existence,  though  es- 
sentially distinct,  are  not  so  irreconcilably  antithetic  as  to 
exclude  the  possibility  of  their  convergence  in  the  same  indi- 
vidual experience.  And  to  the  man  who  has  devoted  him- 
self for  a  lifetime  to  the  study  and  presentation  of  the  deeper 
problems  of  life,  duty,  and  destiny  with  a  view  to  preparing 
his  fellow-beings  for  another  and  better  state  of  existence 
they  may  be  presumed  to  be  as  familiar  as  are  the  strings  of 
a  favorite  harp  to  the  fingers  of  a  skilled  harpist.  In  his  own 
heart  the  aged  preacher  has  often  heard  the  mysterious  yet 


The  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death    317 

meaningful  echo  of  these  strains,  at  one  time  sharp  and 
clear,  at  another  indistinct  and  faint  as  of  sweet  bells  chim- 
ing, now  nearer  and  now  farther  away,  and  he  has  been  de- 
pressed, roused,  admonished,  awed,  fretted,  touched  to 
tears,  and  soothed  by  them  in  turn.  And  now  that  he  has 
unbuckled  his  fighting  gear  and  retired  to  the  shadows, 
these  aspects  of  being  are  apt  to  haunt  his  solitude,  pre- 
senting themselves  in  sterner  and  gloomier  form  than  before 
as  food  for  thought  and  meditation. 

2.  Premature  Senility. 

A  few  men  seem  never  to  grow  old.  A  larger  number 
arrive  late,  and  then  half-protestingly,  at  the  period  when, 
in  the  words  of  the  ancient  Hebrew  pessimist, 

Fears  shall  be  in  the  way, 
And  the  almond  tree  shall  cause  loathing, 
And  the  grasshopper  shall  be  a  burden, 
And  the  caperberry  shall  fail  (or  break  up  *) ; 

while  quite  a  little  army  show  signs  of  age  in  life's  high 
noon,  for  "  men  may  grow  old  without  having  many  birth- 
days." The  deadline  is  a  very  variable  landmark,  and  de- 
pends largely  on  the  mental  idiosyncrasies  and  peculiar  ex- 
perience of  the  individual.  "  I  am  not  an  old  man,  the 
soul  never  grows  old,"  was  the  mild  but  firm  protest  of  a 
venerable  friend — hale,  hearty,  active,  enthusiastic,  and 
hopeful  in  all  his  undertakings  at  eighty  years  of  age — 
when  publicly  referred  to  by  the  writer  as  "  My  old  friend 

Mr. ."     The   benign   and   beautiful  spirit  of   the  last 

of  the  apostles,  sitting  in  his  chair  in  the  church  at  Ephe- 
sus,  to  which  beloved  friends  had  carried  him,  exhorting 
his  "  little  children  "  {reKvla  fiov) — the  young  people  of  the 
third  generation — to  cultivate  among  themselves  a  gen- 
uine Christian  love  (^pyw  Kat  dXrjdeig,),  is  a  commonplace 
of  Church  history,  but  it  is  a  picture  of  the  geniality  and 

*  Compare  Revised  Version  and  Variorum  Bibles. 


318  Ecce  Clerus 

mellowness  of  age  compared  with  which  Cicero's  Cato  (in 
De  Senectute),  garrulously  narrating  his  personal  reminis- 
cences to  young  Laelius  and  Scipio,  is  insipidity  itself. 

The  history  of  every  civilized  people  is  eloquent  of 
examples  of  men  who  did  the  best  work  of  their  lives  be- 
tween the  ages  of  fifty  and  eighty,  and  yet  so  congenital 
and  inveterate  as  a  habit  of  mind  are  depression  and  dis- 
couragement in  many  persons  that  they  seem  to  have  a  cer- 
tain morbid  satisfaction  in  seeing  their  own  sun  "  go  down 
while  it  is  yet  day." 

"  It  is  in  midlife  especially,"  eloquently  observes  one  of 
these  prophets  of  "night  at  noonday,"  "that  we  are  con- 
scious of  jaded  ardor.  We  have  lost,  to  begin  with,  the  phys- 
ical buoyancy  of  early  years.  The  spirit,  too,  is  fatigued.  We 
have  learned  by  many  repulses  the  hardness  of  the  battle. 
In  his  memorable  portrait  of  Napoleon,  Hazlitt  speaks  of 
the  unconquerable  energy  that  flamed  in  every  part  of  the 
theater  of  war,  that  ran  to  meet  danger  wherever  it  showed 
itself  most  formidable,  of  the  strength  of  purpose  and  self- 
confidence  which  constitute  the  definition  of  a  hero  or 
great  man,  attempting  the  utmost  that  is  possible  with  the 
utmost  of  your  power  and  without  the  smallest  loss  of 
time.  In  the  mood  of  midlife  this  sounds  like  dreary  irony. 
We  have  proved  our  weapons,  and  their  edge  has  been 
turned.  Our  circumstances  are  narrow,  and  they  will 
never  be  expanded.  Men  have  made  up  their  minds  about 
us  ;  they  have  seen  us,  measured  us,  and  passed  us  by. 
Except  they  see  signs  and  wonders  they  will  not  believe 
that  we  are  more  than  we  have  seemed  to  them.  Standing 
in  the  center,  we  see  behind  a  tame  and  ineffectual  life, 
and  before  us  monotony  and  decay.  The  hope  of  the 
world  is  not  in  us,  it  is  in  the  young.  We  accept  the  fact 
with  various  feelings,  but  we  are  all  prone  to  accept  it.  To 
some  natures  it  is  a  misery  ;  they  ponder  on  human  need, 
and  their  little  and  slow  means  of  diminishing  it,  till  their 


The  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death    319 

thoughts  beat  upon  the  brain  like  an  anvil,  and  they  become 
fierce  through  hopelessness.  Others  ignobly  acquiesce; 
they  turn  to  the  comforts  that  are  left  them,  and  forget  the 
lofty  passion  with  which  they  once  looked  on  life.  Others 
see  the  ideal  in  dreams,  and  let  the  world  go  past  them. 
In  all  these  cases  the  man  becomes  practically  a  spent 
force." 

It  is  a  sad  and  lugubrious  but  not  uncommon  strain. 

3.  Verdure  and  Sunshine  on  Autumn  Hills. 

The  aged  minister,  however,  as  a  rule,  is  anything  but  a 
morose  and  gloomy  person.  He  does  not  sit,  like  the  retired 
Achilles,  sulking  in  his  tent.  Aloof  from  the  din  and  dust 
of  the  battlefield,  he  still  keeps  his  eye  on  the  varying  for- 
tunes of  the  fight,  and  feels  himself  at  home  no  more  among 
the  decaying  remnants  of  his  own  generation  than  among  the 
men  who  constitute  the  advance  guard  of  the  hour  and  the 
youth  in  reserve  who  stand  ready  at  call  to  recruit  the  con- 
stantly decimated  ranks.  The  Journals  of  John  Wesley, 
the  literary  and  historic  value  of  which  a  distinguished 
English  lawyer,  Augustine  Birrell — essayist,  queen's  coun- 
sel, and  member  of  Parliament — has  recently  commented  on, 
show  how  richly  green  and  beautiful  the  hills  of  age  may 
appear  in  the  light  of  the  declining  sun,  in  spite  of  a  life  of 
incessant  hardship,  care,  and  toil.  On  entering  his  eightieth 
year  he  observes:  "  I  find  no  more  pain  and  bodily  infirmi- 
ties than  at  twenty-five.  This  I  still  impute,  first,  to  the 
power  of  God  fitting  me  for  what  he  calls  me  to  ;  second, 
to  my  still  traveling  four  or  five  thousand  miles  a  year; 
third,  to  my  sleeping  night  or  day,  whenever  I  want  it ;  * 
fourth,  to  my  rising  at  a  set  hour  ;  and,  fifth,  to  my  constant 
preaching,  particularly  in  the  morning  [at  five  o'clock]." 
Two  years  later  he  writes,  "  I  am  as  strong  at  eighty-one  as 
I  was  at  twenty-one,  but  abundantly  more  healthy,  being 

♦  Napoleon  Bonaparte  claimed  the  same  power  of  sleeping  at  will. 


320  Ecce  Clerus 

a  stranger  to  headache,  toothache,  and  other  bodily  dis- 
orders which  attended  me  in  my  youth."  A  year  later  he 
says,  "  It  is  now  eleven  years  since  I  have  felt  any  such 
thing  as  weariness."  At  eighty-five  he  asks,  "  What  differ- 
ence do  I  find  by  an  increase  of  years  ?  "  and  answers:  "  I 
find,  first,  less  activity ;  I  walk  slower,  particularly  up  hill ; 
second,  my  memory  is  not  so  quick;  third,  I  cannot  read  so 
well  by  candlelight.  But  I  bless  God  that  all  my  other 
powers  of  mind  and  body  remain  just  as  they  were."  A 
later  entry,  made  at  the  opening  of  his  eighty-eighth  year, 
before  the  close  of  which  he  died,  shows  with  what  un- 
ruffled and  philosophic  calmness  of  spirit  he  noted  and 
registered  the  growing  symptoms  of  physical  decay:  "Last 
August  I  found  almost  a  sudden  change  ;  my  eyes  were  so 
dim  that  no  glasses  would  help  me,  my  strength  likewise 
now  quite  forsook  me  and  probably  will  not  return  in  this 
world.  But  I  feel  no  pain  from  head  to  foot,  only  it  seems 
nature  is  exhausted,  and,  humanly  speaking,  will  sink  more 
and  more  till  '  the  weary  springs  of  life  stand  still.'  " 

And  the  man  who  by  a  liberal  but  judicious  expenditure 
of  strength  and  energy,  and  a  religious  regard  to  the  laws 
of  health,  offered  to  his  generation  in  the  fullness  of  man's 
years  a  notable  example  of  physical  vigor,  was  equally 
remarkable  for  his  intellectual  and  religious  sanity  and 
his  perfectly  balanced  judgment.  Probably  no  man  has 
better  exemplified  a  well-known  definition  of  culture  as 
"  the  compensation  of  bias  "  than  John  Wesley.  Though 
the  prevailing  tone  of  his  mind  was  a  chastened  and  cheer- 
ful seriousness,  and  the  grand  purpose  that  absorbed  him, 
namely,  the  revival  and  dissemination  of  scriptural  religion, 
intensely  practical  and  immovably  steadfast,  he  was  not 
without  a  strong  sense  of  the  comical  and  diverting  aspects 
of  human  life  and  character.  He  admitted  as  freely  the 
claims  of  humor  as  those  of  devotion,  and  recognized  as 
readily  the  religiousness  of  seasonable  laughter  as  of  that  of 


The  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death    321 

seasonable  tears.  Not  only  did  he  supply  his  people  with  the 
highest  order  of  religious  literature  from  his  own  and  others' 
pens,  and  for  their  intellectual  improvement  epitomize  his- 
tory, abridge  science,  expurgate  Shakespeare,  and  write  a 
treatise  on  domestic  physic  ;  he  even  edited  a  humorous 
novel  for  their  use. 

As  was  to  be  anticipated,  this  last  instance  of  his  versatil- 
ity and  breadth  of  sympathy  with  the  varied  life  of  human- 
ity drew  upon  him  the  condemnation  of  men  of  more  su- 
perficial culture  and  narrower  mind.  A  brief  dialogue  with 
one  of  these,  named  John  Easton,  is  recorded : 

"  Did  you  read  Vindex,  John }  " 

"Yes." 

"  Did  you  laugh,  John  ?  " 

"  No." 

"  Did  you  read  Pythias  and  Datnon^  John  }  " 

"Yes." 

"Did  you  cry,  John?" 

"  No." 

The  revelation  of  such  stolid  terrestriality  and  invincible 
one-sidedness  in  an  esteemed  "  helper  "  proved  too  much  for 
the  man  of  much  soul  and  many  virtues,  and,  clasping  his 
hands  and  raising  his  eyes  toward  heaven,  he  exclaimed  in 
serio-comical  vein,  "  O  earth,  earth,  earth  !  "  * 

Opposed  in  his  work  at  the  outset  by  brother  clergymen, 
and  rigorously  excluded  from  their  pulpits,  the  evening  of 
his  laborious  day  witnessed  a  remarkable  change  in  their 
attitude  toward  him.  The  incident  of  his  meeting  the 
scholarly  Lowth  at  dinner  in  1777  is  one  of  rare  beauty,  and 
is  equally  creditable  to  both  men.  The  bishop  refused  to 
sit  above  Wesley  at  table,  saying,  "Mr.  Wesley,  may  I  be 
found  sitting  at  your  feet  in  another  world."  When  Wesley 
declined  to  take  precedence  the  bishop  asked  him  as  a 
favor  to  sit  above  him,  as  he  was  deaf,  and  desired  not  to 

*  Wesley's  Journals, 

21 


322  Ecce  Clerus 

lose  a  sentence  of  Wesley's  conversation.  Wesley  .  .  . 
fully  appreciated  this  courtesy,  and  recorded  in  his  Journal, 
"  Dined  with  Lowth,  Bishop  of  London.  His  whole  behav- 
ior was  worthy  of  a  Christian  bishop — easy,  affable,  cour- 
teous— and  yet  all  his  conversation  spoke  the  dignity  which 
was  suitable  to  his  character."*  In  1782,  at  Exeter,  Wesley 
dined  in  the  episcopal  palace  with  five  other  clergymen, 
guests  of  the  bishop.  Two  years  later,  at  Whitehaven, 
he  "  had  all  the  Church  ministers  to  hear  him,  and  most  of 
the  gentry  of  the  town."f  Three  years  before  his  death  he 
preached  on  invitation  at  St.  Thomas's  and  St.  Swithin's,  in 
London,  and  remarks,  "  The  tide  is  now  turned,  so  that  I 
have  more  invitations  to  preach  in  churches  than  I  can 
accept."  Still,  till  very  late  in  life,  the  appearance  of  his 
small,  spare,  erect  form  in  the  street  stirred  the  bad  blood 
of  certain  clergymen — deservedly  designated  "  lewd  fellows 
of  the  baser  sort."  Meeting  one  of  these  on  a  sidewalk  too 
narrow  for  two  to  pass,  the  unworthy  "  follower  of  the 
Lamb  "  rudely  remarked,  as  he  held  the  path  and  faced  the 
venerable  figure  approaching  him,  "  I  do  not  step  out  of  the 
path  for  fools."  "  But  I  do,"  said  Wesley,  instantly  stepping 
aside. 

No  wonder  that,  exemplifying  in  himself  such  perfect 
serenity  and  composure  of  mind,  he  succeeded  in  inoculat- 
ing those  most  closely  associated  with  him  with  the  same 
spirit.  At  his  invitation  Adam  Clarke  left  the  paternal  roof 
near  Coleraine,  Ireland,  a  youth  of  twenty-one,  with  a  few 
shillings  in  his  pocket.  On  reaching  Bristol  his  scanty 
assets  were  all  gone  except  three  halfpence.  His  applica- 
tion for  a  place  in  the  famous  Wesleyan  School  at  Kings- 
wood  failed  for  want  of  room,  and  it  seemed  as  if  he  would 
be  left  without  a  place  of  shelter  for  the  night.  Meeting 
Wesley,  who  happened  to  be  away  from  Bristol  when  he 

*  Life,  by  Tyerman,  vol.  iii,  p.  253. 

+  The  English  Church  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  p.  336. 


The  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death    323 

arrived,  shortly  afterward,  the  great  evangelist's  hands  were 
duly  placed  upon  his  head,  and  he  was  sent  forth  to  a  circuit 
comprising  three  or  four  English  counties,  without  the  mea- 
gerest  special  preparation  for  his  work.  For  nearly  fifty 
years  he  traveled  over  England  and  the  Channel  Islands, 
acquiring  a  steadily  increasing  fame  as  an  eloquent  and 
powerfully  persuasive  preacher  of  the  Gospel,  but  even  still 
more  as  a  man  of  profound  and  extensive  learning.  There 
perhaps  never  was  a  more  striking  example  of  the  power  of 
the  human  spirit  to  conquer  apparently  insuperable  diffi- 
culties than  Dr.  Adam  Clarke.  Yet,  though  sharing  to  the 
full  all  the  opposition,  obloquy,  hardship,  and  persecution 
incident  to  the  toils  of  a  Methodist  preacher  in  the  later 
years  of  the  eighteenth  century,  and  experiencing  several 
hairbreadth  escapes  from  death  by  sickness  and  overwork, 
by  violence,  by  accident,  and  by  exposure  to  the  winter's 
cold,  he  lived  to  be  esteemed  and  honored  as  the  brightest 
ornament  of  the  English  Methodist  Church  of  his  day,  and 
to  publish,  besides  many  other  useful  and  learned  treatises, 
the  most  scholarly  and  most  valuable  commentary  on  the 
sacred  Scriptures  that  up  to  that  time  had  appeared. 

According  to  one  of  his  biographers,  the  learned  Dr. 
Etheridge,  Dr.  Clarke's  later  ministry  was  attended  occasion- 
ally not  only  by  distinguished  representatives  of  the  nobility 
of  England,  but  also  by  members  of  the  reigning  family 
such  as  the  Dukes  of  Kent  and  Sussex — a  rare  thing  then, 
but  even  rarer  since.  His  presence  was  sought  and  wel- 
comed at  royal  tables,*  while  ecclesiastical  magnates  like 
Dr.  Blomfield,  Bishop  of  London ;  leading  learned  societies 


*  Mr.  Pettigrew,  Secretary  to  the  Duke  of  Sussex,  writing  to  thank  Dr.  Clarke  for 
a  copy  of  Brj'an  Walton's  famous  polyglot,  which  he  had  caused  to  be  reprinted  with 
the  dedication  to  Oliver  Cromwell  (suppressed  after  the  return  of  the  monarchy),  said, 
"  His  royal  highness  commands  me  to  say  that  he  trusts  whenever  you  come  to  London 
you  will  honor  him  with  a  visit,  when  he  will  be  proud  to  show  you  his  library  [it  con- 
tained fifteen  hundred  Bibles  of  different  ages  and  languages'],  and  be  most  happy  to 
make  the  acquaintance  of  a  man  for  whose  talents  and  character  he  has  so  exalted  an 
opinion."  (Li/e,  by  Etheridge,  p.  395.)  He  was  the  object  of  similar  attentions  from 
the  Duke  of  Kent,  father  of  the  present  sovereign  of  England.    {Vide  Ibid.,  p.  396.) 


324  Ecce  Clerus 

of  the  time,  such  as  the  Antiquarian  Society,  Royal  Irish 
Academy,  Eclectic  Society,  Geological  Society,  Royal  Asi- 
atic Society,  and  American  Historical  Institute ;  and  Aca- 
demical Senates,  like  that  of  King's  College  Aberdeen,  vied 
with  each  other  to  do  him  honor.  And  yet  this  man  whom 
poverty,  disease,  hardship,  malignant  bigotry,  and  providen- 
tial mishap  had  in  turns  seemed  to  begrudge  the  unenvied 
boon  of  an  unprivileged  and  laborious  existence  sang  in 
life's  decline  one  of  the  sublimest  strains  in  praise  of  living 
known  to  the  prose  or  poetry  of  any  language.  Occupying 
at  Portrush,  Ireland,  about  two  years  before  his  death  the 
same  sleeping  chamber  with  the  Rev.  James  Everett,  who 
became  his  earliest  and  most  discriminating  biographer,  he 
rose  according  to  his  wont  at  four  and  left  Everett  in  bed. 
When  the  latter  rose  an  hour  later  he  discovered  on  a  pane 
of  the  window  looking  toward  the  sea  the  following  beauti- 
ful words,  neatly  engraven  with  the  point  of  a  diamond:  "I 
have  enjoyed  the  spring  of  life ;  I  have  endured  the  toils  of 
its  summer ;  I  have  culled  the  fruits  of  its  autumn  ;  I  am 
now  passing  through  the  rigors  of  its  winter;  and  I  am 
neither  forsaken  of  God  nor  abandoned  by  man.  I  see  at 
no  great  distance  the  dawn  of  a  new  day,  the  first  of  a  spring 
that  shall  be  eternal.  It  is  advancing  to  meet  me  !  I  run 
to  embrace  it.  Welcome,  eternal  spring  !  Hallelujah  !  "  * 
Few  of  its  many  eminent  ministers  have  left  a  deeper  im- 
press on  the  Wesleyan  denomination  in  England  than  Dr. 
Jabez  Bunting.  He  is  distinguished  in  the  annals  of  that 
Church  as  one  of  the  two  men  who  during  the  hundred  and 
fifty  years  of  its  history  were  four  times  elected  to  the  high 
and  responsible  office  of  president  of  the  Annual  Assembly 
or  Conference,  f  the  eloquent  Dr.  Robert  Newton,  of  inter- 
national fame — a  contemporary — being  the  other.  Dr. 
Bunting  was  powerful  as  a  preacher,   but  displayed   the 

*  Everett's,  Life  of  Dr.  A.  Clarke.,  p.  450. 
t  The  years  1820,  1828,  1836,  and  1844. 


The  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death    325 

strength  of  an  intellectual  Hercules  in  debate.  So  great 
and  almost  imperial  was  the  influence  he  acquired  in  the 
free  counsels  of  his  brethren  that  recalcitrants  and  enemies 
of  the  Methodist  polity,  on  whom  the  measures  he  advised 
pressed  severely,  spoke  of  him  as  the  "  pope  of  Methodism." 
That  he  was  at  least  capable  of  a  far  nobler  style  of  senti- 
ment and  conduct  than  is  implied  in  that  odious  epithet  is 
strikingly  shown  in  the  following  incident.  Invited  three 
times  in  successive  years  after  his  retirement  from  active 
service  to  preach  an  anniversary  sermon  in  a  certain  church, 
he  inadvertently  selected  on  each  occasion  a  text  in  which 
the  word  "  curse  "  in  some  form  was  prominent.  "  Curse  ye 
Meroz,  said  the  angel  of  the  Lord,  curse  ye  bitterly  the  in- 
habitants thereof,"  etc.  "  If  any  man  love  not  the  Lord 
Jesus  Christ,  let  him  be  Anathema  Maranatha."  "Behold, 
I  set  before  you  this  day  a  blessing  and  a  curse,"  etc.  Not- 
withstanding this  repeated  malediction,  the  church  sent  its 
committee  to  secure  him  a  fourth  time,  but  on  account  of  a 
prior  though  minor  engagement  he  was  obliged  to  decline. 
The  individual  appointed  to  this  duty,  however,  was  a  man 
of  tact  and  persistency,  and  urged,  "Nay,  doctor,  you  have 
three  times  pronounced  a  curse  upon  us,  surely  you  will  not 
refuse  to  come  and  bless  us."  "What's  that.?  "  eagerly  in- 
quired the  venerable  divine.  The  facts  were  repeated  to 
him,  when  he  smiled  and  said,  "O  yes,  my  brother,  I'll 
come  down  and  bless  you  before  I  die."  He  went,  and  from 
the  words,  "Surely  blessing,  I  will  bless  thee," preached  one 
of  the  richest  discourses  he  ever  delivered.*  "  Give  my  af- 
fectionate remembrance  to  your  great  grandfather,"  said 
Dr.  Guthrie,  Scotland's  princeliest  preacher  perhaps  since 
Thomas  Chalmers,  in  writing  to  Miss  Bunting,  Dr.  Bunting's 
grandchild  and  sister  of  the  present  able  editor  of  the  Con- 
temporary  Review;  and  the  graceful  compliment  immensely 
pleased  the   retired  veteran.     "The  common  people  hear 

*  SkeUhts  of  Wesleyan  Preachers,  p.  26. 


326  Ecce  Clerus 

him  gladly,"  was  a  remark  apologetically  made  by  his  gifted 
son,  T.  Percival  Bunting,  at  the  close  of  some  good-natured 
criticisms  of  the  preacher  whose  ministry  the  family  attended 
in  London.  "And,  Percival,"  remarked  the  aged  orator, 
tartly,  "the  uncommon  people  ought  to." 

"Robert,  Robert,"  he  faintly  whispered  at  the  close  of  a 
last  affecting  interview,  just  before  his  death,  with  the  son 
of  one  of  his  early  friends,  "  who's  won  the  Derby  ?  " — the 
great  annual  horse  race  held  on  Epsom  Downs,  near  London, 
in  which  no  Methodist  preacher,  old  or  young,  is  supposed 
to  have  the  slightest  interest.* 

Luther's  asperities  of  tone  and  manner  disappeared  as  he 
grew  old,  and  the  fountains  of  playfulness  and  of  piety  in 
his  ragged  but  noble  nature  sparkled  side  by  side  in  the 
setting  sun  and  mingled  their  waters  in  the  shadowy  vale  of 
his  advancing  years.  "  The  birds,"  he  remarks,  late  in  life, 
"  must  fly  over  our  heads,  but  why  allow  them  to  roost  in 
our  hair  ?  Gayety  and  a  light  heart  in  all  virtue  and  de- 
corum are  the  best  medicine  for  the  young,  or,  rather,  for 
all.  I,  who  have  passed  my  life  in  dejection  and  gloomy 
thoughts,  now  catch  at  enjoyment,  come  from  what  quarter 
it  may,  and  even  seek  for  it.  Criminal  pleasure,  indeed, 
comes  from  Satan,  but  that  which  we  find  in  the  society  of 
good  and  pious  men  is  approved  of  God.  .  .  .  Solitude  and 
melancholy  are  poison.  They  are  deadly  to  all,  but,  above 
all,  to  the  young."  "To  the  gracious  Lady  Catherine 
Luther,  my  dear  wife,"  he  writes,  with  tender  playfulness* 
"who  vexes  herself  overmuch,  grace  and  peace  in  the  Lord. 
Dear  Catherine,  you  should  read  St.  John  and  what  is  said 
in  the  Catechism  of  the  confidence  to  be  reposed  in  God. 
Indeed,  you  torment  yourself  as  though  he  were  not  al- 
mighty and  could  not  produce  new  Doctors  Martin  by  the  i 
score,  if  the  old  doctor  should  drown  himself  in  the  Saal." 
"  There  is  one  who  watches  over  me  more  effectually  than 

♦  Methodist  Recorder,  Christinas  number,  1893. 


The  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death    327 

thou  canst  or  than  all  the  angels.  He  sits  at  the  right  hand 
of  the  Father  Almighty.     Therefore  be  calm."* 

"  There's  sweet  rest  in  heaven,"  remarked  a  lady  friend  to 
the  aged  "  Father  "  Taylor,  of  the  Boston  Seamen's  Bethel. 

"Go  there  if  you  want  to,"  was  the  barely  civil  reply. 

"  But  think  of  the  angels  that  will  welcome  you,"  persisted 
the  consoler  of  the  worn-out  veteran. 

"What  do  I  want  of  the  angels.?  I  prefer  folks."  And 
then,  as  if  recollecting  that  the  poet  Csedmon,  who  once 
left  the  feast  because  he  could  not  sing,  had  designated 
those  supernal  intelligences  "  the  fair  folks  of  God,"  thirteen 
centuries  ago,  he  added,  in  a  more  conciliatory  tone,  "  But 
angels  are  folks." 

*'  How  pleasant  it  must  be,"  said  another  comforter,  "for 
you  to  leave  this  worn-out  tabernacle  and  go  to  a  better 
home  !  "  And  the  reply,  as  reasonable  and  religious  as  cour- 
ageous and  stubborn,  was,  "I'll  stay  while  there's  a  bit  left." 

"  Your  Apologia  is  really  a  theodicy,  professor,"  the  present 
writer  remarked  to  the  venerable  American  patriarch  of 
science,  Professor  Le  Conte,  of  the  University  of  California, 
on  a  recent  occasion,  when  having  started  out  with  a  defense 
of  his  own  scientific  position  on  the  vexed  subject  of  evolu- 
tion against  the  recently  published  criticisms  of  Professor 
Watson,  he  concluded  a  masterly  discussion  with  a  glow- 
ingly eloquent  description  of  the  moral  and  spiritual  future 
of  the  human  race — speaking  as  if  he  had  a  vivid  glimpse  of 
"  the  good  time  coming,"  and  had  made  up  his  mind  to  wait 
here,  if  permitted,  till  the  "  city  of  God  "  arrived. 

"  Mark  the  perfect  man,  and  behold  the  upright  man,"  ob- 
serves the  ancient  Hebrew  sage  and  poet,  "  for  the  end  of 
that  man  is  peace  "  (or  there  is  a  future  to  the  man  of  peace^ 
Variorum  Bible).  In  a  letter  to  Dr.  Wright,  biographer  of 
Charles  G.  Finney,  the  Rev.  Dr.  James  Brand,  Finney's  suc- 
cessor in  the  pastorate  of  the  First  Church,  Oberlin,  finely 

*  Sir  J,  Stephen's  essay,  "  Luther  and  the  Reformation." 


328  Ecce  Clerus 

exhibits  the  nobility  of  that  great  preacher  and  revivalist's 
character  amid  the  lengthening  shadows  of  the  brief  repose 
which  preceded  his  entrance  into  the  rest  eternal.  "  A  more 
genial,  tender,  sympathetic,  childlike  character,"  he  says,  "  I 
had  never  met." 

**  It  became  the  frequent  delight  of  my  life  to  call  and  ques- 
tion him  as  to  what  ought  to  be  done  and  said  for  the  best 
interests  of  the  people.  He  always  sent  me  away  a  wiser  man 
and  with  deeper  longing  to  win  men  to  Christ.  It  was  un- 
questionably due  largely  to  his  wisdom  and  Christian  sym- 
pathy that  the  people  to  whom  he  had  ministered  for  forty 
years  could  consent  to  bear  with  a  new  man  and  a  compara- 
tive novice  at  that  in  his  place.  •  .  .  Like  the  apostle  John, 
President  Finney  made  love  the  principal  theme  of  his  old  age. 
He  could  hardly  refer  to  the  love  of  God  without  weeping."* 

4.  The  Glow  of  Sunset. 

But  not  alone  as  samples  of  the  spirit  and  manner  of  godly 
living  and  of  graceful  **  slowing  up  "  into  the  shadows  of 
life's  terminus  has  God  set  forth  the  ministers  of  his  word, 
but  also  of  the  still  rarer  and  less  valued  but  supremely 
noble  art  of  dying  well.  Such  is  the  sovereign  consequence 
of  this  latter  lesson  that  young  men  of  marked  ability  and 
promise  are  sacrificed  in  the  inscrutable  counsels  of  Provi- 
dence for  the  sake  of  it.  Mustered  out  from  the  ranks  at 
the  opening  of  the  fight,  they  go 

Not,  like  the  quarry-slave  at  night, 
Scourged  to  his  dungeon,  but,  sustained  and  soothed 
By  an  unfaltering  trust,  approach  the  grave 
Like  one  that  wraps  the  drapery  of  his  couch 
About  him,  and  lies  down  to  pleasant  dreams,  f 

There  is  a  touch  of  the  sublime  in  the  dying  struggle  of 
Brainerd  to  wean  his  heart  from  his  beloved  Indians  whose 

♦  Dr.  Wright's  Life  of  Finney,  in  American  Religious  Leaders  Series,  p.  283. 
t  Bryant's  "  Thanatopsis." 


The  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death    329 

salvation  he  had  labored  for  with  such  passionate  and  self- 
consuming  yearning,  and,  as  his  strength  slowly  wastes  away, 
to  turn  his  eyes  toward  the  portals  of  the  eternal  city,  look- 
ing for  the  coming  of  the  "  chariot."  "  O,  if  I  could  be  raised 
up  now,  how  I  would  preach  !  I  have  had  a  sight  of  eter- 
nity," pathetically  observed  the  eloquent  young  Summer- 
field,  obliged  to  lay  down  his  weapon  almost  as  soon  as  he 
had  tested  and  proved  its  power.  And  how  one's  deepest 
sympathies  are  stirred  at  the  thought  of  Robertson,  of  Brigh- 
ton, prostrate  alone  for  hours  on  the  floor  of  his  study  at  thirty- 
seven,  fighting  death  with  closed  fist  and  clinched  teeth  in  res- 
olute silence  and  unutterable  pain.  "Write  on  my  coffin  lid 
*  Unfaithful  John  Smith,'  "  was  the  dying  desire  of  him  of 
that  name,  of  Cudworth,  Yorkshire,  one  of  the  most  tireless 
and  most  triumphant  winners  of  souls,  who  even  in  the  act  of 
doffing  his  armor  at  thirty-two  fought  the  great  adversary  of 
God  and  man  with  one  of  the  most  powerful  arguments  ever 
wasted  on  a  hardened  and  hopeless  reprobate.*  Only  a  few 
hours  after  laying  the  foundation  stone  of  one  of  the  largest 
churches  in  Liverpool,  which  his  immense  and  growing  pop- 
ularity had  made  a  necessity,  the  lifeless  body  of  Thomas 
Spencer  was  floating  in  the  waters  of  the  Mersey,  while  a 
party  of  ministers  awaiting  the  amiable  and  brilliant  young 
preacher's  company  heard  the  boys  in  the  street  under  the 
window  relating  to  each  other  in  subdued  and  sorrowful 
strains  the  story  of  his  drowning  in  the  act  of  bathing.f 

Sometimes  a  modest  husbandman  like  Richard  Hooker 
quietly  comes  forth  for  a  brief  day's  labor  and  creates  a 
bright  oasis  in  the  desert  of  the  world,  and,  leaving  it  green 
and  blossoming  for  the  delight  of  all  subsequent  genera- 
tions, retires  in  manhood's  midday  to  his  appointed  place 
in  the  great  congregation  of  the  just.  Others  enter  into  rest 
full  of  years  and  honors.  "  My  strength  fails  me,  my  mem- 
ory fails  me,  my  speech  fails  me,  but  I  thank  God  my  love 

*  Life,  by  R.  Treffry,  Jr.  t  See  article  in  Pulpit  Analyst. 


330  Ecce  Clerus 

holds  out  still.  That  rather  grows  than  diminishes,"  mur- 
mured the  dying  John  Eliot,  of  whom  Cotton  Mather,  speak- 
ing of  his  value  to  the  commonwealth  of  colonial  Massa- 
chusetts, said,  "  The  whole  building  trembles  when  such  a 
pillar  is  withdrawn."  Sang  the  poet  Herbert,  dying  harp  in 
hand,  accompanying  himself  to  his  own  almost  inspired  strain: 

The  Sundaies  of  man's  life, 

Thredded  together  on  time's  string. 

Make  bracelets  to  adorn  the  wife 
Of  the  eternall  glorious  King. 

On  Sunday  heaven's  gate  stands  ope  ; 
Blessings  are  plentiful  and  rife, 

More  plentiful  than  hope.* 

The  close  affinity  between  melody  and  blessedness  has 
never  been  disputed.  And  there  was  an  item  of  serious 
truth  as  well  as  an  element  of  comedy  in  the  words  of  the 
leader  of  the  Christmas  waits'  band,  when  the  latter  hav- 
ing played  some  wretched  strain,  in  the  dead  of  night, 
under  the  window  of  Moscheles's  chamber,  disturbing  his 
slumbers,  the  distinguished  composer  roused  his  servant 
and  told  him  to  request  the  band  to  leave.  "  Tell  your  mas- 
ter," was  the  loud  and  confident  reply,  "he  will  not  go  to 
heaven  if  he  does  not  like  music."  The  saintly  rector  of 
Bemerton  loved  music,  and  on  its  wings  his  gentle  spirit 
went  smiling  home  to  God,  even  as  the  soul  of  the  Whitby 
cowherd — Csedmon — father  of  Anglo-Saxon  poetry,  is  said 
to  have  done  many  centuries  before. 

"  Weep  not  for  me,  but  for  yourselves,"  said  Bunyan  to  his 
disconsolate  friends,  wife,  and  children ;  "  I  go  to  the  Father 
of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  who  will,  no  doubt,  through  the 
mediation  of  his  blessed  Son,  receive  me  though  a  sinner ; 
where  I  hope  we  ere  long  shall  meet,  to  sing  the  new  song 
and  remain  everlastingly  happy,  world  without  end.  Amen." 
"  I  have  not  apostatized,  have  I  ?"  said  Finney,  curiously  ' 
putting  his  fingers  to  his  own  feeble  pulse  as  if  measuring 

*  Life,  by  Izaak  Walton. 


The  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death    331 

inch  by  inch  every  step  of  death's  approach.  Butler,  of  the 
Analogy,  perhaps  the  brainiest  man  who  ever  sat  on  the  Eng- 
lish bench  of  bishops,  displayed  considerable  anxiety  and 
alarm  at  the  near  prospect  of  death.  His  chaplain,  an  obscure 
man  whose  name  has  been  forgotten,  was  astonished  at  this 
weakness  of  a  great  soul  at  a  critical  moment,  and  took  no 
trouble  to  conceal  his  disappointment.  "  Why,  my  lord,  I  am 
surprised  to  find  your  lordship  express  dismay,"  said  the 
chaplain.  "  Is  not  Christ  the  Saviour  ?  "  "  Yes,  I  know  he 
is  the  Saviour,"  observed  the  dying  prelate,  "  but  how  am  I 
to  know  he  is  my  Saviour.?"  "Why,"  said  the  chaplain, 
with  simple-minded  amazement  at  the  bishop's  oversight  of 
one  of  the  most  familiar  of  promises,  "  he  himself  said,  *  Him 
that  cometh  unto  me,  I  will  nowise  cast  out.'"  "True, 
true,"  said  Butler,  whose  acute  and  capacious  intellect 
seemed  to  have  grasped  every  truth  except  that  of  his  own 
personal  salvation.  "  How  surprising  it  is  that  I  never  real- 
ized that  before.  Now  I  die  happy."  "The  best  of  all  is 
God  is  with  us,"  murmured  the  expiring  "  founder  of  Metho- 
dism," raising  his  arm  in  token  of  final  triumph.  "  I  have 
loved  righteousness  and  hated  iniquity,  therefore  I  die  in 
exile,"  was  the  final  protest  of  the  great  Hildebrand — a  man 
of  another  mold  and  a  very  diff'erent  mission — as  he  breathed 
his  last  in  Salerno.  To  George  Whitefield,  to  Dr.  Thomas 
Arnold,  to  Dr.  Chalmers,  and  to  many  others  Charon's  boat 
came  suddenly  and  stealthily  without  any  premonitory  splash 
of  his  mystic  oar.  "  I  am  a  worm  creeping  into  the  glory 
of  God,"  was  the  characteristic  last  sentiment  of  Richard 
Watson,  the  first  and  greatest  systematic  theologian  of  ecu- 
menical Methodism — a  man  whom  even  Robert  Hall  never 
heard  preach  without  a  feeling  of  indescribable  awe  and 
admiration.  Dr.  Joseph  Beaumont,  one  of  the  most  notable 
of  Methodist  orators  in  the  early  half  of  the  present  century, 
died  in  the  pulpit  in  the  town  of  Hull  while  in  the  act  of 
reading  out  the  inspiring  lines  of  Isaac  Watts's  noble  hymn: 


332  Ecce  Clems 

Thee  while  the  first  archangel  sings, 
He  hides  his  face  behind  his  wings, 
And  ranks  of  shining  thrones  around 
Fall  worshiping,  and  spread  the  ground. 

On  the  broad  area  of  God's  vineyard  his  faithful  servants 
have  fallen  one  by  one  in  every  land,  in  every  kind  of  holy 
occupation,  at  every  moment  of  the  night  and  day,  at  every 
stage  of  life,  but  not  one  has  dropped  unnoticed  by  the 
Eternal  Watcher's  eye.  Death  has  no  terrors  for  the  sons 
of  God.  They  come  to  the  field  of  final  conflict  to  find 
that  the  foe  is  gone.  Within  the  cold  shadows  of  mortality 
they  come  upon  the  open  gate  of  life.  "  You  may  go  now, 
boys  ;  it  is  growing  dark,"  said  Dr.  Adams,  of  the  Edin- 
burgh High  School,  repeating  in  his  last  wandering  moments 
the  usual  formula  of  dismissal  when  the  short  winter's  day 
declined  into  the  twilight  of  the  evening.  **  God  sends  the 
gloom  upon  the  cloud,"  says  that  charming  writer,  Miss 
Fiona  McLeod,  "  and  there  is  rain ;  God  sends  the  gloom 
upon  the  hill,  and  there  is  mist ;  God  sends  the  gloom  upon 
the  sun,  and  there  is  winter.  It  is  God,  too,  sends  the 
gloom  upon  the  soul,  and  there  is  change.  The  swallow 
knows  when  to  lift  up  her  wing  over  against  the  shadow 
that  creeps  out  of  the  north  ;  the  wild  swan  knows  when 
the  smell  of  snow  is  behind  the  sun ;  the  salmon,  lone  in 
the  brown  pool  among  the  hills,  hears  the  deep  sea,  and 
his  tongue  pants  for  salt,  and  his  fins  quiver,  and  he  knows 
that  his  time  is  come,  and  that  the  sea  calls.  .  .  .  How, 
then,  shall  the  soul  not  know  when  the  change  is  nigh  at 
last  ?  Is  it  a  less  thing  than  the  reed,  which  sees  the  yel- 
low birch-gold  adrift  on  the  lake,  and  the  gown  of  the 
heather  grow  russet  when  the  purple  has  passed  into  the 
sky,  and  the  white  bog-down  wave  gray  and  tattered  where 
the  loneroid  grows  dark  and  pungent — which  sees,  and 
knows  that  the  breath  of  the  Death- Weaver  at  the  Pole  is 
fast  faring  along  the  frozen  norland  peaks  ?  It  is  more 
than  a  reed,  it  is  more  than  a  wild  doe  on  the  hills,  it  is 


The  Minister  in  Age,  Retirement,  and  Death    333 

more  than  a  swallow  lifting  her  wing  against  the  coming  of 
the  shadow,  it  is  more  than  a  swan  drunken  with  the  savor 
of  the  blue  wine  of  the  waves  when  the  green  Arctic  lawns 
are  white  and  still.  It  is  more  than  these,  which  has  the 
Son  of  God  for  brother,  and  is  clothed  with  light.  God 
doth  not  extinguish  at  the  dark  tomb  what  he  hath  litten  in 
the  dark  womb." 

5.  He  Being  Dead  yet  Speakctlu 

Surely  not.  For  is  it  not  authoritatively  said, "  The  mem- 
ory of  the  just  is  blest,"  and  "  They  that  be  wise  shall  shine 
as  the  brightness  of  the  firmament,  and  they  that  turn 
many  to  righteousness  as  the  stars  forever  and  ever  ? "  The 
Church,  in  spite  of  her  defects  and  blemishes,  embalms 
and  faithfully  hands  down  from  age  to  age  the  names  and 
memories  of  her  gifted  and  devoted  sons  who  have  self- 
denyingly  proclaimed  the  heavenly  Evangel,  and  the  in- 
fluence of  their  life  and  teaching  has  been  extended  far 
beyond  the  limits  of  the  grave.  To  such  a  double  immor- 
tality has  been  accorded  even  by  consent  and  contribution 
of  the  children  of  their  persecutors.  "  Ye  build, "  said  Christ, 
"  the  sepulchers  of  the  prophets,  and  your  fathers  killed 
them  "  (Luke  xi,  47).  Of  John  Wesley,  whom,  as  we  have 
seen,  the  authorities  of  the  Church  of  his  choice  and  last 
dying  confession  steadily  excluded  from  her  pulpits  till  late 
in  life,  G.  H.  Curteis,  the  Bampton  lecturer  for  1871,  says, 
"  He  was  the  purest,  noblest,  most  saintly  clergyman  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  whose  whole  life  was  passed  in  the  sin- 
cere and  loyal  effort  to  do  good."  "  Frederick  William  Rob- 
ertson," remarks  a  recent  essayist,  "  has  been  dead  more 
than  forty  years,  but  to  us  who  read  his  sermons  to-day  it 
seems  as  if  under  the  cold  clods  of  that  cemetery  near  the 
sea  at  Brighton  a  human  heart  must  be  beating  still  and 
sending  out  warm,  pulsing  waves  of  light  into  the  veins  of  this 
aging  world."     Of  the  illustrious  John  Albert  Bengel,  dis- 


334  Ecce  Clerus 

tinguished  as  preacher,  scholar,  commentator,  and  theolo- 
gian, his  friend  Fresenius  wrote  what  might  mutatis  mutan- 
dis be  said  of  not  a  few  studious  and  devoted  servants  of 
Christ  since  his  day  : 

"A  pillar  falls  ;  a  light  expires ;  a  star  which  shone  so 
brightly  in  the  visible  heaven  of  the  Church  stops  its 
course,  withdraws,  and  mingles  with  the  supernal  glory  of 
the  spirits  made  perfect. 

"An  angel  of  peace,  who  was  as  pious  as  he  was  laborious, 
as  childlike  as  he  was  learned,  as  rich  in  spirit  as  he  was 
acute  in  mind,  as  humble  as  he  was  great,  as  modest  as  he 
was  circumspect  in  his  walk  and  business  of  life. 

"A  friend  of  God  expires,  whom  the  Eternal  Wisdom  led 
into  her  chambers  ;  to  whom  were  opened  the  outgoings  of 
that  light  which  enlightens  human  minds,  the  powers  of 
that  word  which  quickens  souls,  the  treasures  of  that  grace 
which  allures,  leads,  and  saves  us. 

"A  great  spirit  leaves  the  earth  who,  whether  he  measured 
the  heights  or  sounded  the  depths,  showed  himself  equally 
able.  The  most  sacred  of  all  books  was  his  invaluable 
treasure.  He  numbered  and  proved  even  words  and  points. 
He  ventured  into  the  obscure  depths  of  theology,  and  pos- 
terity will  be  able  to  judge  to  what  extent  he  found  footing. 
What  to  others  seemed  dry,  to  him  was  verdure  ;  what  ap- 
peared despised  by  the  many,  was  to  him  the  source  of 
light  and  power,  spirit  and  life. 

'*  He  was  eyes  to  the  blind,  a  leader  to  the  weak,  a  pat- 
tern to  the  strong,  a  luminary  to  the  learned,  an  ornament 
to  the  Church. 

"A  treasury  is  closed,  in  which  the  Lord  of  all  the  treas- 
ures of  grace  had  laid  up  wondrous  wealth  of  knowledge 
and  wisdom.  A  teacher  mighty  in  the  Scriptures  is  no 
more.     Sigh,  children  ;  your  fathers  fall  asleep."* 

•  Quoted  in  Dr.  Etheridge's  Life  of  Adam  Clarke^  p.  459. 


Index 


335 


INDEX 


Adair,  Dr.,  on  health,  314. 

Adam,  Dr.,  of  Edinburgh,  last  words  of, 

332. 
Addam,  Jane,  her  University  Settlement, 

167,  181. 
iSneas,  contemplating  Troy's  destruction, 

iT-onios,  meaning  of,  131,  143. 

Age,  ministerial  cheerfulness  in,  319-328. 

Agricola,  residence  of,  in  York,  31. 

Aim,  definiteness  of,  in  preaching,  98. 

Aked,  C.  F.,  on  the  Baptists,  42. 

Akers,  P.,  95. 

Alciati,  Andreas,  64. 

Ambrose,  St.,  his  rebuke  of  Theodosius,  94. 

Amos,  call  of,  to  prophetic  office,  71. 

Amrou,  sword  of,  249. 

Angelico,  Fra,  his  work  in  San  Marco,  148. 

Angelo,  Michael,  his  frescoes  on  ceiling  of 
Sistine  Chapel,  148. 

Anselm,  parents  of,  73. 

Anthusa,  mother  of  Chrysostom,  72. 

Apocalypse,  date  of  Book  of,  102  ;  fourfold 
apocalyyse  as  to  last  things,  133. 

Apocrypha,  Fourth  Book  of  Esdras,  15. 

Apologists,  early  Christian,  81. 

Aquinas,  his  estimate  of  Chrysostom's 
homilies,  62. 

Arius,  his  heresy,  26;  Thalia^  27. 

Armenia,  Turkish  barbarities  in,  202. 

Arminius,  his  letter  to  Uitenbogaert,  44; 
Beza's  opinion  of,  74  ;  bred  as  a  Calvin- 
ist,  64 ;  left  fatherless  in  boyhood,  64  ; 
educated  at  the  expense  of  the  Mer- 
chants' Guild  at  Amsterdam,  64;  rejec- 
tion of  Calvinism,  7^. 

Army,  Salvation,  origin  of,  53 ;  leaders  of, 
55  ;  achievements  of,  54  ;  its  freedom  from 
conventional  restraints,  172 ;  its  draw- 
backs, 182  ;  Bishop  Brooks  on,  179. 

Arnauld,  Port  Royalist,  22. 

Asbury.  first  bishop  of  American  Metho- 
dist Episcopal  Church,  226,  297. 

Assizes,  English,  31. 

Athanasius,  his  training,  72  ;  his  acquaint- 
ance with  Greek  philosophy,  81  ;  influ- 
ence on  Nicene  Council,  62 ;  banish- 
ment, 26. 

Attila,  23,  268. 

Augurs,  Roman,  their  frivolity,  107. 

Augustine,  St.,  his  study  of  Plato,  81  ;  his 
influence  on  Western  thought,  62. 

Authoritj',  spirit  of,  253  ;  despotism  of,  45 ; 
Christian  doctrine  of,  256  ;  qualifications 
for,  256  ;  responsibility  of,  257  ;  imposed 
by  God,  256  ;  ends  of,  altruistic,  257 ; 
abuse  of,  deprecated,  263,  258;  forms  of 
embodiment  of,  in  apostolic  times,  259. 


B 

Bacon,  Lord,  on  adversity,  292. 

Baptist,  his  ministry,  17  ;  his  courage,  26, 

94. 
Barrow,  Isaac,  orator,  83  ;  mathematician, 

Basil,  eloquence  of,  22  ;  his  study  of  Ro- 
man law,  82. 
Baxter,  Richard,  at  Kidderminster,  48, 05 ; 

a  nonconformist,  48;  as  a  pastor,  48  ;  ms 

neglect  of  health,  307. 
Beard,  Dr.  George  M.,  on  longevity,  296. 
Beaumont,  Dr.  Joseph,  sudden  death  of, 

331- 
Bedford,  county  jail  of,  in  Bunyan  s  day, 

21.  307- 
Beecher,  Lyman,  his  family  of  preachers, 

75  ;  influence  on  Wendell  Phillips,  94. 
Beet,  Dr.  J.  A.,  Criticism  of  Last  Things 

of,  141. 
Bengel,  Joh n  A Ibert ,  Fresenius' s  eulogy  on , 

333- 

Bernard,  of  Clairvaux,  22,  94,  285  ;  of  Clu- 
ny,  22. 

Besant,  Sir  Walter,  on  Greek  athletic  con- 
tests, 149. 

Bethlehem,  St.  Jerome's  retreat  at,  22. 

Beza,  Theodore,  a  student  of  law,  82  ;  com- 
mendation of  Arminius,  74. 

Bible,  not  "The  Religion  of  Protestants," 

."3- 
Bigotry  in  modern  England,  39. 
Bishop,  glory  of  a,   262 ;  functions  of  a, 

265. 
Booth,  General,  23 ;  founder  of  Salvation 

Army,  53  ;  on  Dante's  Inferno,  172  ;  on 

misery  of  the  masses,  74. 
Booth,  Mrs.  Maud  B.,  on  Salvation  Army, 

180. 
Bolingbroke,   Lord,    attends    Whitefield's 

preaching,  239. 
Borgia,  Alexander,  crimes  of,  24,  267. 
Bourdaloue,  plainness  of  speech  of,  288. 
Boyce,  Marcella,  Mrs.  Humphrey  Ward's, 

171- 

Brainerd,  David,  among  the  tribes  of  the 
Delaware  and  Susquehanna,  68  ;  his  dy- 
ing words,  98,  329. 

Briggs,  C.  S.,  on  sources  of  authority  in 
religion,  114. 

Buddhism,  in  Ceylon,  207;  Bishop  of  Co- 
lombo on,  104;  alertness  of  leaders  of, 
209;  effects  on  devotees,  207;  transmi- 
grations of,  206. 

Bunyan,  John,  his  parentage,  61;  experi- 
ence as  a  soldier,  82  ;  his  popularity,  95 ; 
journey  in  the  rain  between  Reading  and 
London,  307;  last  words,  330;  compared 
with  Robert  Hall,  281. 


336 


Index 


Bunting,  Dr.  Jabez,  his  power  in  debate, 
325 ;  eminence  among  the  Methodists, 
324  ;  popularity  as  a  preacher,  325  ;  his 
death,  330. 

Burroughs,  John,  on  observing  nature,  149. 

Butler,  Bishop  Joseph,  his  death,  326. 

Byron,  Lord,  on  tall  men,  315. 

c 

Caine,  Right  Hon.  W.  S.,  on  missions,  212, 

21^. 

Calvin,  early  good  fortune  of,  64  ;  relation 
to  the  Montmors,  64;  a  student  of  law, 
64;  as  a  theologian,  61  ;  his  teachers,  64; 
his  address  to  Francis  I,  280 ;  at  Geneva, 
96  ;  his  defiance  of  his  persecutors,  243. 

Caraffa,  Cardinal,  founder  of  the  Inquisi- 
tion, 269  ;  his  rules,  270. 

Carey,  William,  his  versatility,  82. 

Carpenter,  Bishop  Boyd,  letter  on  reunion 
of  Churches,  57. 

Catechism,  Gace  s,  39. 

Cicero,  lament  of,  16. 

Cincinnati,  its  laboring  class,  169. 

City,  modem  its  character  and  condition, 
165  ;  Brooklyn,  168. 

Civilization,  Christian,  beginning  of,  13. 

Chalmers,  Dr.  T.,  his  love  of  mathematics, 
82  ;  failing  health  of,  309  ;  sudden  death 
of,  331. 

Channing,W.E.,  educated  asaCalvinist,  79. 

Chatham,  Lord,  speech  against  oppression 
of  American  colonies,  q6._ 

Charles  II  of  England,  clerical  satellites  of 
court  of,  28. 

Chicago,  foreign  population  of,  167. 

Chirol,Valentine,on  missions  in  China, 201. 

Christ,  proclaimer  and  proclamation  of 
God's  kingdom,  88 ;  his  love  of  the 
people,  184;  doctrine  of  person  of,  106; 
our  Exemplar,  no;  his  sinlessness,  no; 
teacher  of  his  people,  11^  ;  only  source  of 
authority,  113  ;  our  sacrifice  for  sin,  n6  ; 
the  solution  of  all  problems,  118  ;  pledge 
of  our  completed  manhood,  121 ;  our 
Judge,  123  ;  his  sympathy,  184  ;  his  un- 
popularity, 245. 

Christendom,  great  doctors  of,  71. 

Christianity,  in  its  inception  a  simple  proc- 
lamation of  good  news,  87 ;  an  apoc- 
alypse, 192  ;  superior  to  all  other  reli- 
gions, 105  ;  not  narrow,  108;  its  relation  to 
heathenism  interpretive,  192  ;  claims  of 
Founder  of,  105  ;  program  of  Founder  of, 
186;  ethics  of,  no;  hindrances  of.  177; 
antipopular  elements  of,  242 ;  a  religion 
of  the  people,  246 ;  a  message  of  power, 
248 ;  adapted  to  the  popular  need,  249  ; 
secret  of  its  success  its  sociability,  184 ; 
must  get  back  to  the  people,  185. 

Christians,  united  prayer  of,  191. 

Christian  Year,  author  of,  39. 

Chrysostom,  John,  Demosthenes  of  Greek 
Christianity,  61 ;  piety  of  mother  of,  72  ; 
his  poverty,  61 ;  his  popularity  at  An- 
tioch  and  Byzantium,  61  ;  laments  his 
failure,  98  ;  his  vision,  98  ;  his  death  in 
exile,  268. 


Church,  Christian,  its  problem,  171 ; 
method  of  meeting  it,  174 ;  its  failure, 
177  ;  secret  of  success,  183,  187  ;  early 
Church,  256. 

Church,  R.  W.,  124. 

Clarke,  Dr.  A.,  his  early  poverty,  66;  called 
to  the  ministry,  323  ;  his  labors,  323;  his 
learning,  323  ;  his  praise  of  life,  324. 

Clement  VII,  his  love  of  war,  24. 

Clement  of  Alexandria,  his  knowledge  of 
heathen  philosophies,  81. 

Clement  of  Rome,  his  Epistle  to  the  Cor- 
inthians, 263. 

Colombo,  Bishop  of,  204;  Buddhism  in, 
200, 

Congress,  Church  of  England  of  1869,  31. 

Constantlne,  Emperor,  birth  of,  30;  resi- 
dence of,  in  York,  30. 

Conviction,  a  secret  of  oratorical  power,  93. 

Cookman,  Alfred,  early  death  of,  309. 

Craftsman,  personality  of  the,  146. 

Cranmer,  Archbishop,  his  martyrdom,  95. 

Creed,  a  necessary  evil,  37  ;  early  creeds, 

I2p. 

Criticism,  modern,  place  and  value  of,  76. 

Cromwell,  court  of,  28. 

Cuthbert,  St.,  his  faith,  63. 

Cyprian,  St.,  22  ;  in  exile,  27. 

Cyran,  St.,  21,  46.     _ 

Cyril,   of   Alexandria,   his  ambition,   27 ; 

Charles    Kingsley's  characterization  of 

him,  27 ;  Milman's,  27. 


Dead,  sainted,  memory  of,  preserved,  333. 
Death,   idea  of,  among  the  Greeks,  121 ; 

skeptical  view   of,  122 ;  Christian  view 

of,  123. 
De    Medici,  Catherine,   her  part   in   the 

slaughter  of  the  Huguenots,  269. 
De  Noblle,  Robert,  217. 
Denominatlonalism,  evils  for  which  it  is 

responsible,  40. 
De  Saci,  22 ;  as  a  translator  of  Scripture, 

46..  .        , 

Destiny,  human,  a  new  doctrine  of,  18. 
Dharmapala,  on  missions  in  India,  197. 
Difficulties,  ministerial,  a  test  of  character, 

Di  Fiore,  saying  of,  70. 

Discipline,  mental,  value  of,  83. 

Dogma,  meaning  of  the  word,  93  ;  decline 
of,  75.  ... 

Doctrines,  cardinal,  of  Christianity,  inde- 
structible, 77. 

Dominic,  St.,  his  loyalty  to  Rome,  45. 

Dort,  Five  Points  of  Synod  of,  279. 

Drummond,   Professor,  72 ;   on  Christian 
Society,  186. 

E 

Eaglen,  Robert,  spiritual  father  of  Spur- 
geon,  79. 

Edwards,  Jonathan,  as  a  pastor,  23,  and 
preacher,  127. 

Edwin,  King  of  Northumbria,  baptism  of. 

Education,  college,  in  India,  213. 
Eisenach,  Luther  at,  63. 


Index 


337 


Eligus,  St.,  eulogium  on,  262. 

Eliot,  John,  his  work  among  the  Indians, 
68;  last  words  of,  329. 

Eloquence,  popular  estimate,  235 ;  ele- 
ment of  power  in  sacred  eloquence,  246, 
248. 

Emerson,  R.  W.,  early  predilection  for 
the  ministry,  283. 

Environment,  molding  of,  70. 

Episcopos,  word  used  interchangeably  with 
presbyter  OS,  261. 

Episcopate,  early,  contrasted  with  ecclesi- 
astical monarchies  of  later  times,  263. 

Eusebius  of  Nicomedia,  27 ;  of  Caesarea, 

^7;  . 

Euripides,  lines  of,  121. 

Evangel,  the  Christian,  88 ;  significance  of 
term,  102;  scope  of,  118;  theme  of,  io6. 

Exercise,  physical,  necessary,  310;  re- 
quires time,  311;  contributes  to  mental 
vigor,  311. 

Experience,  our  mental,  a  series  of  con- 
trasts, 130. 

Fairbairn,  Dr.  A.  M.,  of  Mansfield  Col- 
lege, on  the  fate  of  Edward  Irving,  50. 

Farel,  influence  of,  over  Calvin,  74. 

Farrar,  Archdeacon,  on  Jeremy  Taylor 
160. 

Findlay,  W.  H.,  on  missions  in  India,  216. 

Finney,  Charles  G.,  trained  for  the  law, 
82  ;  early  difficulties  of,  284  ;  fearlessness 
of,  286  ;  rebels  against  Calvinism,  278  ; 
his  geniality  in  age,  327  ;  power  over 
the  legal  mind,  95  ;  dying  words,  330. 

Firstborn,  supremacy  of  the  divine,  108. 

Fletcher,  John,  of  Madeley,  on  Arminius, 

64-  .     . 

Frith,  W.  P.,  on  painting,  151. 

e 

Gehenna  not  the  Greek  Tartarus,  130. 

Gideon,  60. 

Gifts,  preacher's  distinctive,  19  ;  physical, 
not  to  be  despised,  315. 

Gladstone,  g6. 

God,  his  glory  written  on  the  soul,  193. 

Gomarus,  F.,  his  persecution  of  Arminius 
at  Leyden,  44. 

Gore,  Charles,  on  the  virtue  of  consider- 
ateness,  57. 

Gospel,  a  call  to  repentance,  iii  ;  not  sim- 
ple, 115;  existed  eternally  in  archetype 
and  idea,  144. 

Government,  spiritual,  a  gift  of  the  Spirit, 
256 ;  simple  forms  of  early  Church,  259. 

Gregory  I,  22  ;  VII,  22, 

H 

Hadrian,  Emperor,  residence  in  York,  31. 

Hall,  Robert,  on  Richard  Watson,  97 ; 
early  timidity  of,  280  ;  lofty  standard  of 
public  speaking,  281  ;  compared  with 
Bunyan,  281 ;  his  neglect  of  his  health, 
308. 

Hall,  Dr.  Newman,  287. 

Hamerton,  P.,  on  longevity,  297  ;  on  pres- 
ervation of  the  senses,  300. 

22 


Hatch,  Dr.  E.,  on  early  Christian  socie- 
ties, 252  ,  on  functions  of  early  bishops, 
265. 

Health,  influence  of,  on  character,  297  ; 
value  of,  to  minister,  303 ;  neglect  of,  in- 
excusable, 304  ;  injured  by  overclothing, 
314. 

Hearers,  vanous  types  of,  163. 

Heathenism,  Christian,  positive,  171;  to 
be  studied,  203 ;  its  attempts  at  self- 
reform,  196  ;  imitation  of  Christianity, 
200  ;  its  policy  of  persecution,  201  ;  its 
effects  on  the  minds  and  morals  of  its 
devotees,  205 

Henry  IV,  of  Germany,  at  Canossa,  268. 

Henry,  Matthew,  his  estimation  of  the 
value  of  the  soul,  98. 

Henrj',  Patrick,  aiding  the  American  Rev- 
olution, 96. 

Herald,  ancient,  dignity  and  authority  of, 

87-  .     . 

Herbert,  George,  died  singing,  330. 

Heredity,  its  force,  71,  301. 

Hermit,  Peter  the,  22. 

Hernhutt,  Moravian  colony  of,  294. 

Hildebrand,  death  of,  at  Salerno,  331; 
majesty  of  character  of,  285. 

Hindu,  his  character,  209. 

Hinduism  a  curse  to  Hindus,  113. 

Holmes,  Oliver  W.,  catholic  sentiment  of, 
39;  his  view  of  doctrine  of  eternal  pun- 
ishment, 138. 

Home,  influence  of,  72, 

Hook,  W.  F.,  a  sectarian,  36. 

Hooker,  Richard,  words  of,  77 ;  kindness  of 
Bishop  Jewell  to,  64  ;  pupil  of  a  puritan, 
78  ;  Master  of  the  Temple,  82  ;  victim 
of  domestic  worry,  ^06. 

Horton,  Dr.  R.  F.,  his  complaint  of  eccle- 
siastical narrowness,  42. 

Howe,  John,  278  ;  chaplain  of  Cromwell, 
95  ;  his  resignation,  28. 

Hughes,  Hugh  P.,  his  eloquence,  93  ;  on 
apostolic  succession,  38. 

Hurst,  Bishop,  on  Indian  alumni,  213. 

Hygiene,  importance  of,  to  ministers,  296. 

I 
Ideal,  its  value  for  the  preacher,  91  ;  in 

sermon   making,   148 ;    its    power,   151 ; 

value  for  style,  151. 
Ideas,  moral,  empire  of,  84. 
Ignatius,  martyrdom  of,  effect  on  fortunes 

of  the  Christian  Church,  264 ;  letters  of, 

264. 
Illustration,  homeliness  of,  158 ;  employed 

by  Christ,  158;  examples  of  abstruse,  160. 
Immortality,  natural,  of  the  soul,  142. 
Inferno,  Dante's,  170,  172. 
Innocent   III,  24;  oflTers  thanks  for  mas- 
sacre of  Huguenots,  269. 
Intemperance,  effects  of,  on  industry  and 

morals,  igo. 
Intolerance,  religious,  39. 
Inquiry,  rational,  its  functions  and  limits, 

76. 
Inquisition,  terror    of,    270 ;    victims  ofi 

270;  methods  of,  271. 


338 


Index 


lona,  monks  of,  62._ 

Irving,  Edward,  ministry  of,  in  London, 
so ;  sermon  before  London  Missionary 
Society,  69. 

Isaiah,  his  birth  and  pedigree,  71. 

Itinerancy,  its  antiquity,  218  ;  Methodist, 
founder  of,  zao ;  answers  a.  profound 
need  of  human  nature,  210;  in  the  Mid- 
dle Ages,  219;  brotherhood  of,  224;  trials 
of,  contrasted  with  settled  pastorate, 
225 ;  practical  present-day  value  of,  227 ; 
severe  discipline  of,  228  ;  drawbacks  of, 
230;  criticism  of,  231. 

Itinerant,  early  type  of,  219  ;  a  wanderer 
in  the  interests  of  truth,  219  ;  self-eflFace- 
ment  of,  228. 

J 

Jenkins,  E.,  his  DeviCs  Chain,  166. 

Jerome,  St.,  fondness  for  study,  27. 

Job,  Book  of,  rewards  of  religion  in,  i8. 

Jobson,  F.,  benediction  on,  290. 

Judge,  Christ  our,  123  ;  his  qualification 
for  office  of,  124. 

Juggernaut,  story  of,  i97_. 

Julius  II,  warlike  disposition  of,  24. 


Keble,  John,  23. 

Ken,  Bishop,  as  a  hymnist,  23. 

Kingsley,  Charles,  his  characterization  of 
Cyril  of  Alexandria,  27. 

Knowledge,  origin  of,  299 ;  raw  material 
of,  298. 

Knox,  John,  eloquence  of,  22 ;  reply  of, 
to  Mary  Queen  of  Scots,  285  ;  his  influ- 
ence on  Scotland,  95. 


Latimer,  Bishop,  27. 

Labor,  Report  of  Commission  of,  in  United 
States,  16S ;  its  condition  in  Europe, 
172. 

Lahore,  Presbyterian  College  of,  212. 

Last  Things,  controversy  concerning,  127. 

Laud,  Archbishop,  268. 

Laymen,  their  rights  abridged,  265. 

Leaders,  early  Christian,  indifferent  to 
titles  and  forms  of  authority,  253 ;  com- 
parison of,  in  different  ages. 

Lec^ue,  Solemn  (and  covenant),  293. 

Le  Conte,  Professor,  optimism  of,  327. 

Leo  I,  his  spiritual  power,  23  ;  confront- 
ing Attila,  94. 

Leo   X,  his  sensualism,  24 ;  skepticbm, 

lOI. 

Leo   XIII,  his  temporizing   policy,  273; 

his  tyranny,  272. 
Liberalism,  no  breadth  in,_  54 ;  its  denials 

fatal   to   high    imagination   in    art  and 

religion,  55  ;  dogmatism  of,  5s  ;  leaders 

of,  113. 
Lichfield  Cathedral,  62. 
Life,  quality  and  tone  of,  296;  breath  of, 

301. 
Lindisfame,  monks  of,  62. 
London,  Moncure  Conway  on,  170. 
London,  The,  Magazine,  on  the  churches 

of  the  city,  176. 


Longevity,  within  individual  control,  301 ; 
Dr.  Richardson  on,  302  ;  the  cumula- 
tive result  of  wise  self-government,  303. 

Longley,  Archbishop,  31. 

Loyola,  his  support  of  the  papacy,  45. 

Luther,  22;  parentage  of,  63,  73;  his 
Protestantism,  63  ;  his  domestic  cheer- 
fulness, 326, 

WL 

Macfadyen,  Mrs.,  of  Drumtochty,_  152. 

Mclntyre,  Robert,  on  Methodist  itin- 
erancy, 2JI. 

McLeod,  Fiona,  on  the  great  change,  332. 

McTavish,  the  Highland  preacher,  152. 

Maimonides,  Moses,  his  funeral,  125 ;  epi- 
taph on  his  tomb,  41. 

Mallalieu,  Bishop,  on  York  Minster,  29. 

Mamertine,  prison  of  the,  21. 

Man,  doctrine  of  his  relation  to  the  uni- 
verse, 298. 

Manhood,  ministerial,  its  necessity,  90; 
its  value,  go ;  aim  of  the  labor  of  the 
ages,  91  ;  Christ  the  pledge  of  our  com- 
pleted, 121. 

Manning,  Cardinal,  79. 

Martyn,  Henry,  306. 

Martyr,  Justin,  81. 

Masses,  condition  of,  168  ;  their  salvation 
sought,  177;  neglected  by  the  wealthy, 
170  ;  how  reached,  183. 

Mather,  Dr.  Cotton,  on  Rhode  Island,  49. 

Mazzini,   Joseph,  his  estimate  of  Christ, 

Melanchthon,  object  of  excessive  motherly 
affection,  73 ;  his  learning,  22 ;  versatil- 
ity, 82. 

Methodism,  British  and  American,  52. 

Milman,  Dean,  on  Cyril  of  Alexandria,  27. 

Milton,  John,  91. 

Minerva,  shield  of,  147. 

Minister,  popularity  of,  often  incompati- 
ble with  faithfulness,  243  j  his  varied  in- 
fluence for  good,  26 ;  his  self-adapta- 
bility, 32  ;  in  the  making,  59  ;  should  be 
in  touch  with  the  people,  60  ;  his  sense 
of  pathos,  289;  his  study  of  life,  316; 
his  theme,  105 ;  his  poverty  an  advan- 
tage, 61 ;  an  artist,  148  ;  his  absorption  in 
his  work,  94,  150. 

Ministers,  early  Methodist,  294 ;  their 
physique,  218 ;  premature  death  of,  328 ; 
immortal,  333 ;  past  compared  with 
present,  276. 

Ministry,  recruits  its  ranks  from  all  grades, 
59 ;  Methodist,  66 ;  lofty  ideal  of,  220 ; 
against  all  forms  of  evil,  187  :  its  con- 
demnation of  wrong  definite  and  specific, 
187 ;  manifest  destiny  of,  56. 

Missionary,  work  of,  198,  203  ;  preparation 
needed,  197;  problem  of,  196;  policy  of 
203 ;  self-denial  of,  216. 

Missionaries,  the  Irish,  62 ;  Moravian, 
68. 

Missions,  a  century  of,  194 ;  results^  of, 
194  ;  schools  of,  iq6  ;  results  of  mission- 
ary education  in  India,  China,  etc.,  196 ; 
heathen  criticism  of,  197  :  ancient  mis- 
sion to  England,  198  ;  outlook  of,  199. 


Index 


339 


Monica,  Neander's  praise  of,  72. 
Moscheles,  anecdote  of,  330. 
Mohammedanism  in  India,  209. 
Mystery,  an  essential  part  of  religion.  107  ; 
the  Gospel  a  hidden,  107. 

.    .    ^   . 
Name,  the  Christian,  origin  of,  255. 
Nations,  their  migrations,  219. 
Nature,  attitude  toward  her,  149;  use  of 

her  pregnant  hints,  150. 
Nautch  girls  in  India,  206. 
Neander,  22  ;  sketch  of  him,  236. 
Nelson,    John,    traveling    companion    of 

Wesley,  221. 
Newcastle-on-Tyne,  Wesley's  fondness  for 

it,  221. 
Newman,    Cardinal,    his    eulogy   on    St. 

Peter,  32  ;  converted  under  the  ministry 

of  T.  Scott,  79 ;   travels  of,  in   Sicily, 

283;  his  hymn,  "  Lead,  kindly  Light, 

283. 
Newnham  on  reciprocal  influence  of  hody 

and  mind,  298. 
Newton,  John,  23. 
New  York,  city  of,  169,  wage-earners  in, 

Ochino,  Bernardino,  his  exile,  270. 
Odyssey,  poor  men  of  the,  65,  121. 
Officials,    Church,  their    names,  whence 

derived,  260. 
Orator,  "  bom,  not  made,"  236  ;  orators  of 

Christian  history,  248. 
Orders,  monastic,   powerful  when    poor, 

69. 
Otis,  James,  96. 
Owen,   John,    one   of    the    founders    of 

theBritish  and   Foreign  Bible  Society, 

38. 

Owen,  Dr.  John,  Puritan,  his  opinion  of 
Bunyan,  61. 

P 

Pacifex  Maximus,  n6. 

Paganini,  135. 

Parker,  Theodore,  55. 

Pascal,  Blaise,  22. 

Passover,  Feast  of,  14. 

Pastorate,  ideal  of,  only  once  realized, 
276. 

Paul,  his  courage,  26 ;  his  training,  71 ; 
hope  of  Rabbinism,  78. 

Pauhnus,  Bishop,  30. 

People,  their  humor,  288 ;  victims  of  com- 
petition, 172  ;  municipal  corruption,  172  ; 
militarism,  188  ;  of  the  saloon,  190;  sal- 
vation of,  its  factors,  173. 

Persecution,  origin  of,  266 ;  the  Decian, 
27. 

Phelps,  Austin,  his  physical  breakdown, 
309. 

Philadelphia  wage-earners,  168. 

Philanthropy,  renaissance  of,  178 ;  lit- 
erature of J  178. 

Philanthropies,  great,  their  rise,  38. 

Phillips,  Wendell,  96. 

Pilgrims,  the  original,  their  religious  ear- 
nestness, 293. 


Pleroma,  Christ  the,  124. 

Polity,  ecclesiastical,  no  authorized  form 
of,  251. 

Polycarp,  his  rebuke  of  Marcion,  ^g, 
268. 

Poor,  piety  of  the,  292. 

Popularity,  no  sign  of  public  usefulness, 
239  ;  often  morally  enervating,  241  ;  ex- 
amples of  its  enfeeblement,  244. 

Population,  rural,  its  depletion,  167. 

Port  Royalists,  22. 

Posty,  in  Auld  Lang  Syne,  291. 

Poverty,  prominent  in  heathen  religions, 
69 ;  Its  place  and  purpose  in  Christian- 
ity, 68. 

Poverty,  Peerage  of.  Hood's,  223. 

Power,  love  of,  an  earthly  passion,  a66 ; 
abuse  of,  264. 

Preacher,  personality  of,  146 ;  secret  of 
his  power,  20;  his  sphere  various,  21; 
his  influence  for  good  abiding,  28 ;  his 
sense  of  humor,  290  ;  his  faith  in  God's 
work,  249. 

Preachers,  great,  their  memories  not  re- 
called by  monuments,  28. 

Preaching,  essential  elements  in,  87 ; 
power  of,  95  ;  prime  object  of,  i6i ;  must 
be  adapted  to  the  needs  of  the  people, 
162 ;  test  of  a  standing  or  declining 
church,  99 ;  in  Middle  Ages,  loi. 

Priest,  supplants  the  preacher,  100 ;  re- 
sisted by  the  reformer,  100. 

Proclaimer,  dLspensation  of,  17. 

Progress,  measurable,  29. 

Prophesying,  liberty  of,  restrained,  265. 

Prophet,  his  function,  17 ;  decay  of  pro- 
phetic faculty,  15. 

Protestantism,  its  relation  to  freedom,  34 ; 
disruption  of  its  unity,  35  ;  narrowness 
of  degenerate,  47. 

Prototokos,  significance  of,  108. 

Providence,  City  of,  168. 

Punishment,  eternal,  reconcilable  with 
God's  essential  love,  138. 

Punning,  examples  of,  in  New  Testament, 
289. 

Punshon,  Dr.  W.  M.,  287. 


Quakers,  their  decline,  293. 


Ranke,  Leopold  von,  loi. 

Raphael,  his  picture  of  Leo  I  resisting 
Attila,  268, 

Rattenbury,  John,  37. 

Redruth,  Wesley  at,  52. 

Reformer  influenced  by  his  age,  277. 

Religion,  revealed,  encourages  independ- 
ence of  thought,  78  ;  sources  of,  89;  the 
great  religions  encourage  poverty,  69 ; 
heathen,  to  be  studied  in  their  home  as> 
pect,  205. 

Renaissance,  its  relation  to  liberty  of 
thought,  34. 

Renan,  Joseph  Ernest,  renounces  Catholic 
faith,  283. 

Resurrection,  hope  of,  I3i. 


340 


Index 


Retribution,  future,  doctrine  of,  129 ;  de- 
cline of  faith  in,  128  ;  various  views  con- 
cerning, 127  ;  no  figment  of  media;val 
fancy,  129 ;  taught  in  New  Testament, 
130;  no  theodicy  in  silence,  135  ;  causes 
of  silence,  137. 

Revelation  of  the  sons  of  God,  133. 

Richardson,  Sir  B.  W.,  on  vital  force,  302. 

Richelieu,  Cardinal,  persecutes  St.  Cyran, 
46,  267  ;  his  statecraft,  46. 

Robertson,  Frederick  W.,  confronting 
doubters  of  Brighton,  95;  his  feeble 
health,  308;  his  patient  suffering,  329; 
his  permanent  influence,  333. 

Rome,  Empire  of,  extent  of,  15  ;  govern- 
ment of  its  provinces,  16;  despotism  of 
papal  Rome,  47 ;  diplomacy  of,  47 ; 
modem  instances  of,  272 ;  change  of 
policy  of,  277. 

Rule,  Benedictine,  22. 

Rutherford,  Samuel,  23. 


Sabatier,  Paul,  on  sympathy,  186,  292. 

Sallust,  his  Sempronia,  17. 

Salmond,  Professor,  his  eschatology,   140. 

Savonarola,  eloquence  of,  22  ;  as  a  states- 
man, 82  ;  early  discouragements  of,  94, 
280. 

Schools,  theological,  must  be  adapted  to 
the  times,  75. 

Sea,  Northern,  story  of  an  island  in,  316. 

Sectarianism,  narrowing  influence  of,  on 
the  mind,  34. 

Senility,  premature,  317. 

Sermon,  materials  of,  153;  its  unity,  151 ; 
power  of  the  ideal  in  sermon-building, 
149  ;  structure  of,  156. 

Service,spiritual,gloryof,undiscerned,263. 

Settlement,  University,  in  Chicago,  t8i. 

Severus,  Emperor,  residence  in   York,  31. 

Shelley  on  self-sacrifice,  153. 

Simpson,  Bishop  97. 

Simon  (Peter),  his  poverty,  71. 

Socialism,  its  worth  and  weakness,  181 ; 
Dr.  W.  Robertson  Smith,  his  expulsion 
from  Free  Church  of  Scotland,  44. 

Spencer,  Thomas,  of  Liverpool,  329. 

Spermologos  in  Athens,  222. 

Spinoza,  cursing  of,  40.     Renan  on,  40. 

Spiirgeon,  his  early  poverty,  67 ;  early 
fame,  75  ;  conversion, 79  ;  his  power  as  a 
preacher,  97;  on  plainness  of  speech, 
155;  his  courage,  285;  self-denial,  285  ; 
Quaker's  estimate  of  him,  238 ;  his 
charm  as  a  speaker,  238  ;  victim  of  af- 
fection, 309. 

Stanley,  Dean,  quoting  Bunyan,  41. 

St.  Francis  d'Assisi,  70,  loi. 

St.  Chad,  62. 

St.  Cyran,  his  imprisonment  in  Vincennes, 

St.  Tetricus,  epitaph  of,  262. 

Summerfield,  John,  his  premature  death, 
308,  329. 

System,  the  nervous,  the  borderland  be- 
tween man's  spiritual  and  material  na- 
ture, 300. 


Talmud,  traditions  of  the,  15. 

Taylor,  Father,  of  Boston,  his  struggles 
with  early  poverty,  66.  Dr.  Bartol  "on, 
67  ;  in  old  age,  527. 

Taylor,  Jeremy,  his  Golden  Grove,  161. 

Tennyson,  160. 

Theodicy,  none  in  silence,  135. 

Theodore,  Archbishop,  62. 

Theme,  unity  of,  151. 

Thompson,  Archbishop,  31. 

Tiberius,  his  oppression  of  the  Roman 
province,  16. 

Tongue  0/  Fire,  92. 

Training,  ministerial^  adapted  to  times, 
75 ;  liberal,  77  ;  varied  and  comprehen- 
sive, 80. 

Treffrey,  Richard,  Jr.,  early  death  of,  308. 

Truth,  Christian,  often  unpopular,  242. 

Type,  conformity  to  ministerial,  required, 
35  ;  penalties  of  departure  from,  42. 

IT 
Ulphilas,  Bishop,  22. 
Unltarianism  a  half  truth,  37. 
Unveiling,  Christianity  an,  134. 


Vaga,  Latin  name  of  Wye,  223. 

Vagabond,  ancient  types  of,  223. 

Versatility,  St.  Paul's,  81. 

Von  Gerok,  240. 

Vulgate,  the,  22. 

W 

Walsh,  Thomas,  Hebraist,  his  early  death, 
308. 

Walsh,  Archbishop,  274. 

War,  its  evils,  188  ;  cost,  189. 

Wartburg,  Castle  of,  63. 

Watson,  Richard,  last  words  of,  331. 

Watts,  Isaac,  23. 

Way,  Christians  men  of  the,  112. 

Wesley,  Charles,  23. 

Wesley,  John,  his  parents,  65  ;  home  life, 
65 ;  his  High  Churchmanship,  79;  his 
self-denial,  65  ;  his  failure  in  Savannah, 
282  ;  his  reply  to  his  accusers,  286 ;  his 
theological  liberalism,  52;  his  courage, 
a86 ;  wit,  321,  221 ;  meeting  with  Bishop 
Lowth,  321  ;  his  popularity  among 
Churchmen  late  in  life,  322  ;  his  vigor  in 
age,  319  ;  his  twelve  rules,  220. 

Wesley,  Samuel  Sebastian,  dying  wish  of, 

54- 

Westcott,  Bishop,  quoted,  15. 

Whitefield,  George,  22  ;  early  life,  66;  ex- 
cessive labors,  307  ;  death  of,  331 ;  his 
eagerness  to  persuade  men,  98. 

Whittier,  John  G.,  lines  of,  194;  his  Bar- 
clay ojf  IJry,  242. 

Wilberforce,  William,  96. 

Wilberforce,  Bishop  of  Oxford,  his  ad- 
vice to  a  court  preacher,  288. 

Williams,  Roger,  his  militant  disposition, 
48  ;  founder  of  American  Baptists,  49 ; 
his  varied  ecclesiastical  experience,  49. 

Wiseman,  Cardinal,  letter  on  Catholic 
Unity,  47. 


Index 


341 


Wittenberg,  63. 

Witness,  use  of  the  word  in  St.  John's 
Gospel,  102. 

Wolsey,  Cardinal,  condones  crimes  of  his 
master,  Henry  VIII,  28  ;  dies  broken- 
hearted, 268. 

Wordsworth,  William,  his  lines  on  banks 
of  the  Wye,  307. 

Worms,  city  of,  63. 

Worth,  moral,  consciousness  of,  284. 

Wren,  Christopher,  his  memorial,  28. 


Wycllf,  John,  22 ;  as  a  diplomatist,  83 ; 
his  dying  protest,  94. 

Y 

York,  city  of,  England,  its  cathedral,  30; 
churches  of,  31  ;  Minster  described,  29. 

X 

Xavier,  his  work  in  India  and  Japan,  68  ; 
his  cultivation  of  vermin,  305  ;  Sir  James 
Stephens  on,  305 ;  death  of,  305. 


UCSB    LIBRARY 


